this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (9 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Angry Elsevier noises intensify in the background...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

"We work hard every day to stamp 'peer-reviewed' on ChatGPT botslop and collect money. It's a valuable service."

[–] [email protected] 59 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Scientist here. I encourage everyone to use a shadow library like Scihub to break the stranglehold that Elsevier and Wiley have on the free availability of knowledge. These are financialized corporations that add nothing to society and leach off of scientists' hard work.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Why scientists HAVE to publish on those platforms rather than some other reasonable alternative?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I would guess university agreements with publishers

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Aka academic corruption.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

Why scientists HAVE to pay to publish on those platforms rather than some other reasonable alternative?

[–] [email protected] 46 points 5 months ago (1 children)

People shouldn't have to email you. Put your papers on arxiv.org or your own web site.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 5 months ago (5 children)

A number of journals actually have clauses around how you can't publish it anywhere else if they accept it.

So you can't 'publish' it in those places, but you can send it privately to people who ask.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 5 months ago

People can ask me for it by sending a "GET" request to my web server using the HTTP protocol.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

And then those can "leak" it :)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It seems like that could just about go in one's email signature:

"If this message has an attached published paper, please do me the service of making this publicly available via arxiv /scihub or other agency as I'm typically bound from doing this by the publishers conditions"

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

At least where I live the laws are such that publishers can claim copyrights only after they added their "editor" customizations such as publisher logos, page numbers, layout changes etc.

The manuscript that you/the scientist wrote and handed in to the publisher is free of that, the publisher cannot claim any rights at that state. So you always have the right to publish the "unedited" manuscript anywhere including researchgate, arxiv, your website etc.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Boycott the journals! Both the readers and the researchers!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Damn Straight!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Usually that's just for their version. Arxiv the version before it was accepted.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 5 months ago

That 'just email us' is a significant piece of friction in the way of scientific freedom of enquiry. Look to arxiv or equivalents...

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You're not wrong, but it's not good enough to simply make it available somehow today, you want it publicly searchable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

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,)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

That's cool, something like arxiv...

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (7 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Stop making excuses and send me that film you made. I know you want to do it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ha you don’t want to see my trash shooting

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

now I'm wondering if you think your filmmaking skills are bad or if your film involves you using firearms on garbage cans.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

Until now I could get by with Scihub and Arxiv for college and personal hyperfixation research, but I'd actually love to ask an author directly some time if I ever run into a paper where that's necessary.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Ive had mixed results with this, but one author was really excited (as was i) and we had a good back and forth for a bit after i had a chance to read/digest the paper.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

You could drop the pirate flag because this isnt even piracy

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yes, this is how I made it through grad school lol. Wish I knew as an undergrad, but that's fine.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

There are a whole bunch of people who might be scientists who are not in academia.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (5 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Professors these days are extremely overworked - it's possible it simply got lost, plus it's not their business to provide a copy, especially for someone they think might be able to get one via their own means. Anyway you are right: it doesn't always work.:-)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Try contacting the non-lead authors (even if the article says "contact email"; usually the journal insists you pick one, but the others are also free to send you the article.)

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

By the way, in almost 100% of cases (the rest being just OA where the published version could be sent by anyone to anyone or something legally really dubious), the authors have a right to send their paper, even if it is published in a paywalled journal. Basically, the only thing the journal has a right to for subscription-based (aka those that cost $35) articles is content plus page layout. If the authors have the exact same text but formatted differently, they are free to distribute it wherever and however they want.

Preprint servers or lab/personal websites are best first choices for that.

edit: a small disclaimer on the exact same text meaning exact same text the authors provided; if the editor in the journal has corrected some typos and inserted a/the here or there (a common thing for non-natives to miss), then this becomes more of a grey area, because technically at this point it’s not a 100% authors’ text).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (4 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Sci-Hub was the most similar exploitation of such "situation"

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