Imagine living in a world where it has to be explicitly said that you are allowed to send someone a free copy of something you wrote.
The research was paid for by someone. It is not unheard of for a company to offer a grant under the condition that they get the results, say, six months before the rest of the world.
This the the case for publically funded research as well. Scientific journals have paper submitted for free, papers reviewed for free, then they charge the $35/article fee to anyone who reads it, or more generally, they charge universities/etcs in the 5 to 6 figures sum/year for unlimited access.
Scientific journals are a billion dollar industry who do literally nothing for that money. They limit scientific progress to make money, and thats it.
If they review papers for “free” is that not worth something?
I definitely don’t think it should be for profit but it seems like there is value and costs to what they do. That money has to come from somewhere.
EDIT: I am unfamiliar with the process so I took OP’s words at face value. Several others indicate this is inaccurate. So, seems like all they do it host/publish the papers. Which does cost money, but that just seems like something that should be funded by other means rather than users paying. Kinda weird to hide science behind an arbitrary paywall.
Just so we’re clear, it’s not obvious nor is the general public misunderstanding anything. There are not a lot of situations like that with basically any other thing that has been monetized. I am a filmmaker. Even if I directed, produced, and starred in the film, I cannot necessarily send you a copy for free even if I want to (legally). There are other parties involved that restrict what I can and can’t do with the product, typically film festivals until the festival circuit is done and then distributors.
This is very common and most people just kind of assume It to be the case with academic journals.
There are other parties involved that restrict what I can and can’t do
I’m going to guess it’s got something to do with the high cost of creating the actual film reel that gives creditors the power to dictate access to the film as per a contract.
You see how that may be different yet?
It is different, but tbf academics are also reliant on external funding sources to conduct research. It’s not absurd to think that the grant writers or university administration might have some stipulations about the free distribution of research they paid for.
Have we forgotten what happened to Aaron Swartz? With the state of the world today, I naturally expect everything to be monetized, regardless of whether it makes any rational or ethical sense.
To be fair though, the people who fund the research are not the people who lose out if the publisher isn’t paid their £30. They are very often governmental or inter-governmental research agencies and programmes. Realistically it is rare for anyone except from the publisher to care about free distribution. The publishers are however pretty vicious (e.g. Swartz’s case).
Stop making excuses and send me that film you made. I know you want to do it.
now I’m wondering if you think your filmmaking skills are bad or if your film involves you using firearms on garbage cans.
Can anyone point to the law on this? I am in science and still was under this impression. Why is film different? I do share papers but I always thought I was doing so in the shadows. When I want to republish an image I’ve created that I’ve used in another paper I need to ask the publisher for permission to do so (this is pretty explicit) and then cite that source in the new publication. Ive assumed the publisher now owns my words as well and that I cant just share that with anyone. If that’s not true what sets it apart from your film? Can I share it as much as I’d like? Can I just put all my pdfs on my instutional public facing website? Does funding source matter at all?
Usually, for academic journals, you can retain most of your copyrights and grant a license to the journal. You have to pay attention to the options they give you when going through the publishing process, though. Because it does depend.
Some funding sources require that you retain certain copyrights in order to comply with things like public access mandates.
What I don’t understand, and maybe somebody can explain. If this is the case, why wouldn’t there be torrents of every paper whose authors would be genuinely delighted to share?
Not being skeptical here. I’m really curious.
And maybe there are, and they’re just not well advertised for understandable reasons?
Too many small files, papers need different indexing.
Shadow libraries (like scihub, Anna’s archive etc.) are the way to go - as long as scientists don’t or can’t publish Open Access which is what needs to happen.
Too many small files
Not as many small files as many games have, and people have figured out how to torrent those… 😂(just compress it in a zip or similar)
Honestly I’ve heard this and seen it written very many times, but any time I’ve ever reached out to a lead author to request access to their paper I’ve been met with zero reply. Like, nothing, from at least six different attempts (that I can remember right now). And I’m a government employee emailing from a government domain, usually with a very well written plea for information. Maybe I’m the unlucky one?
Oh, government email domain would scare anyone off. It’s as bad as a “fbi.com” address. I doubt the permission is really there as the post says, what I have seen is the contrary. Anyway, try with a regular email address. If you want, as background story, say you’re a student in a third-world country. That’s how I lived before Sci-Hub (via VPN) and it worked out most of the time (e.g. ~75% success rate).
Thanks for the advice - I’ll definitely take that into account! To be clear (without doxxing myself) my emails came from a ‘.nsw.gov.au’ address so I hope that wouldn’t steer many academics away from sharing their findings, especially those whose research was conducted in other Anglophonic countries (specifically the US and Canada). I can understand the hint of hesitation though. I always assumed using my .gov.au email would have evaded spam filters, but perhaps my regular email address might have more luck.
I should also state that the research I’ve been trying to access is predominately psychological or social work academia (I’m a child protection caseworker), and I’m not sure if the same “share it if you got it” mantra applies in those fields.
When I was in academia, my inbox was like 40% emails like “publish your next article here”, " you are invited to conference x", “your article on x”. You get a lot of spam that is generated with text snippets from your work, so it is very targeted. You just have to start ignoring most emails. The other 60% is just work convos from known sources, so it is very easy to separate the two. Or kind of… you could still get an invitation or a review request, but you sort of know peoples names and names of joirnals. I guess its just hard to get by this.
I work as a non-academic at a research university.
Let me tell you, academics love discussing and sharing every phase of their papers, especially the findings and subsequent theories or discoveries. I get to participate in research activities quite frequently and some of it is so fascinating. They love someone showing interest and love sharing on their knowledge and findings. There’s a couple I’ll be waiting months more to hear conclusions on, but it’s that “so cool if true” stuff. I can’t imagine the anticipation of those involved, but even if they hit a wall, they explain they’re still just as excited to know they’ve closed the door on something and may open the door to something else.
It seems like such rewarding work.
There’s also a stigma around journals the older and more experienced academics get. I won’t get into it, but yeah, all good things are open to exploitation and often the younger ones are held under wings to guide them on the right path for quicker career growth. That’s just how it eventually works with humans for any thing that’s meant to be of best intentions.
But most people are good people and their passion is untameable, so all you need is just ask them to share knowledge—they absolutely will. The vast majority are certainly not in it for the money, not unless it can get them more financing for more research lol.
You’re not wrong, but it’s not good enough to simply make it available somehow today, you want it publicly searchable.
I wonder if it would be possible to create some sort of database of authors and papers that would be searchable. Click a button, send an automated request to a burner email.
(Then maybe fork thunderbird with an auto reply attaching the paper.)(or maybe offer a cloud storage service and email service and handle that “internally”. We’d need a lawyer to discuss the line on that,)
