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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."
Due to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act law he was looking at $1 million in fines and / or 35 years in prison. And he took the suicide way out.
Now with the TPP things can be just as bad or worse.
We must stamp out this blatant sharing of important scientific information lest the poor publishers go broke, and end up in the street, naked and hungry and homeless!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Now if somebody could put together an open-source tool to automate this. The tricky part would be making sure that the requester doesn't get twenty thousand copies of the paper she asked for...
Why would Libertarians oppose this? Most oppose Intellectual Monopoly laws. Now if you had a contract with a publisher that you wouldn't republish I guess that could hurt your reputation but there shouldn't be anything illegal about it.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
On some university website,e.g. MIT, Harvard Stanford. Timely means within one year of a journal publication, as compromise for journal companies and busy professors.
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.
I've worked at several research universities over the years. The "official" way to get articles for journals you don't subscribe to is usually to make an interlibrary loan (ILL) request. In theory it works similarly to what was just described, in that the request is out to a large pool of libraries and then one will (usually) reply fairly quickly with the article.
The problem though is the inconsistent quality. The optimal method is for the library to download the article themselves and then send along the PDF unaltered; some do this. Others see this as a violation of the subscription terms and will only respond by scanning a print journal if they have it, and sending the scan, this is slightly worse. Even worse yet I have had some where the library "loaning" the article will download it, print it, then scan it in grey scale on some awful scanner from the 80s, add their cover page, then send that as a PDF. (Note that the libraries never need the article to come back from "loan" as it is all digital.) This process usually takes 1-3 working days depending on availability, motivation, trade winds, phases of the moon, etc.
If this system worked better there would be less need for researchers to directly circumvent the system through twitter. Even better of course would be if fewer journals were paywalled at all.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I was under the understanding that, at least in the US, papers resulting from public funding should already be in the public domain.
This is only now starting to be mandated by funding agencies. Previously, even publicly funded research was routinely paywalled behind incredibly expensive journal subscriptions.
Speaking as a scientist this activity has a certain whiff of hypocrisy about it though. If we all published our papers in open access journals, which is now almost ubiquitous in particle physics, there would be no need to smuggle copies of papers to anyone and then even those who lack the contacts or are concerned about legal repercussions can read the papers too. It also helps to undermine the increasingly oppressive copyright laws which governments are foisting on all of us.
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?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Depends on the field. Most journals are ok with making preprints available, but some are not. Here is a list of policy by journal.
The papers author may want their cut too
The authors of journal articles actually pay the publisher, not the other way around.
Yeah, I feel just awful for those poor, poor double-dipping parasites, can you tell?
Think of the children! This paywall loophole in unacceptable in any decent society.
He broke the law very blatantly. He had other tools available to accomplish the same ends but opted for the one that was maximally disruptive and maximally destructive.
So did the North American Colonies and their Continental Army.
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.
This isn't limited to the scientific community, although the insanely expensive journal subscriptions magnify the problem in that area. The problem is that content is increasingly not "printed" and therefore the journals' role is less relevant now. This happens with interlibrary loan of things like eBooks and media, as well as journals. The problem is that wherever you get it from, and whatever DRM timebombs the content, some library has to buy the journal subscription to get the content in the first place.
I'm not sure what the solution is. It's another one of those disruptive things that could put a lot of people out of work and change the scientific landscape. If everyone just publishes whatever they want, where's the quality bar set for research? Don't the journals curate content submissions? This would also force academics to be graded on a different scale for tenure, etc. if "number of accepted submissions" doesn't mean anything anymore.
Libertarians don't oppose this. The companies publishing papers don't have a "right" to stay in business.
While the current system may have made sense in the days of physically published journals it doesn't anymore.
Authors aren't paid.
Authors provide articles in required format.
Reviewers aren't paid
There is no need for this industry to remain. There is no need for the government to subsidize them. And Libertarians don't support the subsidizing of companies.
The only reason to keep the information private is if the researchers (authors) of the article wanted to keep it behind closed doors. Which, of course, doesn't make much sense. Why would one publish something if one wanted to keep the research private.
The only libertarians who may argue for this are those who don't understand that the creators of the information and the reviewers of the information (the parties responsible for the intellectual content) want the information to be disseminated and they don't directly receive compensation for their research. (Of course the University system has the "publish or perish" concept. But that's a separate issue regarding compensation.)
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
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.
It's fun to violate the D M C A.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Mother Theresa is a poor choice if you're going for contrast, she was a fairly sadistic and hypocritical person who denied seriously ill people actual medical treatment in her "hospitals", denied the sick contact with their families, and got nothing but the best medical treatment for herself when illness reared its head.
My understanding is that a lot of scientific work are funded via public money, yet the copyright gets assigned to private entities. In the context of copying vs. 'taking', their behavior is closer to 'taking' than what the researchers are doing. Simply because they prevent access to it by others.
If viewed as a public "investment", limiting access to the knowledge actually reduces the "payback" by not spreading the findings to anyone who wants it. This in turn probably lowers overall quality by having fewer (and perhaps less qualified) people examining the findings.
The above arguments hinges on it being publically funded research.
Personally I value that the researchers are more interested in spreading knowledge and solving real problems than adhering to something as byzantine and riduculus as the current copyright laws. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" was their stated purpose; when they are clearly retarding progress what is the solution? Reform them? Or get your work done, for the benefit of all of humanity?
Maybe at the very least we need an exception, like fair use for scientific purposes?
I never understood comments like yours.
Just because someone is not willing to stand trial or "accept the consequences" for their actions doesn't invalidate their initial actions.
Civil disobedience doesn't somehow become morally wrong because you don't want to go to trial, "face the music", or allow yourself to be arrested. The idea is that by breaking some laws, you call attention to the injustice of those laws. Getting arrested may or may not help with that, but it has nothing to do with whether or not the law was wrong in the first place.
If Rosa Parks had decided not to allow herself to be arrested and fought back physically against the cops who arrested her, she likely would have been violently arrested, even beaten, but that would not have invalidated her initial refusal to move from her seat.
Edward Snowden's disseminating of the information he took from the NSA is valuable information everyone needs to know about how our government spies on its own citizens. His running from the law has nothing whatsoever to do with that; that information is valuable to all Americans whether or not he broke the law, so why do we care if he "faces the music"?
the professional societies - IEEE, etc.
Many of them are just as bad as the publishers. IEEE journals are closed access and require copyright assignment. The bottom line is that there is an immense cost to scientific progress because of literature access restrictions. They need to be abolished.
Personally, I am a scientist who has worked at under-resourced US institutions, and lack of journal access routinely causes weeks of delays while waiting for inter-library loan to come through. While many folks who work at tier-1 schools and corporations are in favor of open access, they generally don't understand the depth and urgency of the closed-access problem as it impacts second tier US and international, especially developing world, institutions.
.: Semper Absurda
[Citation Needed]
There you go.