How Scientists Are Circumventing Journal Paywalls (bbc.co.uk)

Bruce66423 writes: Some academics are fighting back against publishers of academic journals by providing copies of papers to researchers who don't have access. For some reason, the publishers aren't happy! Cognitive scientist Andrea Kuszewski said, "Basically you tweet out a link to the paper that you need, with the hashtag and then your email address. And someone will respond to your email and send it to you." That begins the conversation, and then the scientists cover their tracks: "Once contact is made, all subsequent conversation is kept off of social media — instead, scientists correspond via email. The original tweet is deleted, so there's no public record of the paper changing hands. Kuszewski and others say the method is necessary to get up-to-date research in the hands of academics from developing countries, and her and other scientists say they consider the pirating 'civil disobedience' against a system that includes for-profit publishing companies."

Comments

I have all of mine on my website.

[serviscope_minor]

I posted my preprints to arXiv just prior to submission and any published papers I put on my website. A journal has never complained at me.

Re:I have all of mine on my website.

[mrvan]

Same here. I think any researcher who wants her/his work to be found does this. Most publishers even allow it in the pre-published form (with review corrections, but without journal typesetting) and/or after a certain time. Researchgate also has a "request full paper" button that allows the researcher to respond by sending privately or by uploading. I've not heard of a single case of a researcher being sued for publishing his own work on his own homepage. It helps that the Netherlands copyright law doesn't allow for punitive damages (imho it's an abomination to have "punitive" anything in civil law, that's what criminal justice is for), so the max they can sue for is demonstrable missed earnings.

What's more, funding agencies are finally pushing against the paywalls and more and more grants demand open access publications. The libraries are also getting involved, and if I've been informed correctly, the Dutch university libraries have a deal with Springer that in return for continuing their $$$ subscriptions, all research published with a corresponding author from a Dutch institution will be automatically open access.

I think the end of paywalled research is finally coming, and the publishers would be wise to find their role and business model in that world rather than trying to stop it (looking at you, Elsevier!)

Eh?

[TechyImmigrant]

The abstracts are available. You can find who wrote it. If I need a paper I email one of the authors and they send it.
People email me asking for papers I wrote.

Why the need for tweeting?
 

Re:many universities require timely free posting

[mrvan]

The chief drawback of this system is that important papers are scattered all over the place. If you are looking something specific you can find it with a search engine. But if you are periodically browsing the literature to catch up on ideas you may not see these articles unless someone ahas constructed an index.

Yes, this is exactly the problem.

My field is (applied) text analysis. I want to be able to treat the body of literature as a data source. I want to be able to search through, visualize, topic model and classify the literature. I don't want to apply the search tools of the various publishers, I want the data. On my hard drive. Now.

Absurdly complex solution to a simple problem

[xeos]

The abstracts are always available, and nearly universally include the author's email address. I've yet to meet a scientist who wasn't enthusiastic to email a copy of their article to me. And I've had plenty of requests for my own papers that I've responded to, usually within hours or minutes. I don't think that the amount of delay incurred materially slows down the pace of scientific research. Frankly, I've got a pile of papers on my desk I'm meaning to read, all of which are days old, if not older. While this method of dissemination may be slightly annoying, it works very well for modern papers. Something published decades ago can be a lot harder to find via email, but generally it's a lot more useful to read current research than older results.

Journals are prestige merchants...

[sugarmatic]

Journals were once curators of information relevant to a subject for areas of interest outside the reach of traditional library curation.

Library science has been quietly and revolutionarily been relegated to obsolescence in the age of the internet.

Journals would be functionally relegated to the same fate were it not for an additional value they add to academia...the constant search for prestige and citation that academia demands.

A Nature pub simply offers more social intangibles than Arxiv.

More societal benefit might be derived from other open access alternatives, but those alternatives offer no career and personal intangible benefits in the way that Nature offers.

Re:Fair use exception for research purposes?

[thylordroot]

The National Institutes of Health now requires that future papers funded through their coffers to be publically available via their own publication repository called PubMed (see the policy here), though the copyright of the manuscript does not change (see this FAQ on the matter). All in all, I can't say the change has been a bad one. If you will pardon the expression, the state of biomedical research is evolving rapidly thanks to significant advances in instrumentation and processing capability. With next generation sequencing alone, researchers are innundated with terabytes of data, and biologists must now adapt to not only a new methodology, but also the almost-daily discoveries that have arisen from it. Without access to the literature, modern microbiology becomes a very harrowing field.

Re:He doesn't deserve a place in this discussion

[gerddie]

[Citation Needed]

There you go.