People shouldn’t have to email you. Put your papers on arxiv.org or your own web site.
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.
People can ask me for it by sending a “GET” request to my web server using the HTTP protocol.
And then those can “leak” it :)
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.
Usually that’s just for their version. Arxiv the version before it was accepted.
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.
Why scientists HAVE to publish on those platforms rather than some other reasonable alternative?
I would guess university agreements with publishers
Aka academic corruption.
Oh, that sucks tho
Why scientists HAVE to pay to publish on those platforms rather than some other reasonable alternative?
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,)
That’s cool, something like arxiv…
That ‘just email us’ is a significant piece of friction in the way of scientific freedom of enquiry. Look to arxiv or equivalents…
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?
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.)
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 graduated 4 years ago and don’t have access to my academic email anymore. So maybe checking for an author still at the institution might help. Could also be unlucky.
I’ve not tried much, but it has worked for me from a normal Gmail address.
Scihub ftw! 🏴☠️
If it still functionally existed.
Yes, this is how I made it through grad school lol. Wish I knew as an undergrad, but that’s fine.
There are a whole bunch of people who might be scientists who are not in academia.
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.
