To get a copy of a paper, all you need to do is contact the author, as scholars have done for centuries. Arriving at my first academic job more than 30 years ago, the first thing I found my desk was preprinted stationary with the message "Dear Dr ___, please send me a copy of your paper ___ which appeared in ___". I still have a cupboard full of journal article offprints to send away in response to such requests. Of course, email and PDF make the old ways redundant. In the past, journal publishers typically gave you 50 offprints for free to send to correspondents. Now, my favourite publisher gives me a PDF of the article exactly as they have published it, again for free. While I am not supposed to publish it online, I can send it to anybody I please.
The solution to open access issues should involve making sure that this time-honoured mechanism continues to work, and certainly should not include requiring authors to pay for the right to publish their articles. Unfortunately, this iniquitous policy is on the increase, and some people are even happy to see it.
Slashdot Mirror
To get a copy of a paper, all you need to do is contact the author, as scholars have done for centuries. Arriving at my first academic job more than 30 years ago, the first thing I found my desk was preprinted stationary with the message "Dear Dr ___, please send me a copy of your paper ___ which appeared in ___". I still have a cupboard full of journal article offprints to send away in response to such requests. Of course, email and PDF make the old ways redundant. In the past, journal publishers typically gave you 50 offprints for free to send to correspondents. Now, my favourite publisher gives me a PDF of the article exactly as they have published it, again for free. While I am not supposed to publish it online, I can send it to anybody I please. The solution to open access issues should involve making sure that this time-honoured mechanism continues to work, and certainly should not include requiring authors to pay for the right to publish their articles. Unfortunately, this iniquitous policy is on the increase, and some people are even happy to see it.