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.
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.
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.
If they review papers for "free" is that not worth something?
I definitely don't think it should be for profit but it seems like there is value and costs to what they do. That money has to come from somewhere.
EDIT: I am unfamiliar with the process so I took OP's words at face value. Several others indicate this is inaccurate. So, seems like all they do it host/publish the papers. Which does cost money, but that just seems like something that should be funded by other means rather than users paying. Kinda weird to hide science behind an arbitrary paywall.
I could be wrong, but my understanding is the reviews are done by other academics for free, if at all... That's why getting published is kind of reputation based and circular because the cheapest review is just to look up whether they've been published before.
I have been the referee for two articles at an academic journal. It said in their agreement that for three or more papers per year you'd be compensated this and that much. But I guess I misunderstood because they emailed me and asked to pay me for just the two reviews. Anyhow, it basically no money. The time you put in to do a proper review is a lot more than what you are compensated for. Your uni still pays your salary, so this is just a bonus, but still, very little. This journal is hosted by a public entity, private ones may be very different.
I am unfamiliar with the process so I took OP's words at face value.
You misunderstood. The journals get the papers submitted for free (i.e. they don't pay the authors) and reviewed for free (i.e. they don't pay the reviewers).
AFAIK, peer reviewers are typically other academics in the field (peers) that are asked to voluntarily review a given article. The publisher doesn't pay peer reviewers.
The journals dont review anything. Other scientists do the reviews for free. Scientific prominence is a key to promotion for scientists, so they publish and review to keep and advance their jobs. Journals were built to abuse this fact.
Scientists publish papers for free, other scientists reviews papers for free, journals charge billions/yr to publish this free work, now mostly in digital formats, a medium that is effectivly free when serving text files.
Scientific journals are a racket, bar none. There are attempts to open source the publishing of these journals, but often if you publish in an open source one, the for profit journals will not accept the piece.
Angry Elsevier noises intensify in the background...
"We work hard every day to stamp 'peer-reviewed' on ChatGPT botslop and collect money. It's a valuable service."
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 :)
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"
Boycott the journals! Both the readers and the researchers!
Damn Straight!
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.
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.
Stop making excuses and send me that film you made. I know you want to do it.
Ha you don’t want to see my trash shooting
now I'm wondering if you think your filmmaking skills are bad or if your film involves you using firearms on garbage cans.
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?
That 'just email us' is a significant piece of friction in the way of scientific freedom of enquiry. Look to arxiv or equivalents...
Scihub ftw! 🏴☠️
You could drop the pirate flag because this isnt even piracy
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?
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).
Thanks for the advice - I’ll definitely take that into account! To be clear (without doxxing myself) my emails came from a ‘.nsw.gov.au’ address so I hope that wouldn’t steer many academics away from sharing their findings, especially those whose research was conducted in other Anglophonic countries (specifically the US and Canada). I can understand the hint of hesitation though. I always assumed using my .gov.au email would have evaded spam filters, but perhaps my regular email address might have more luck.
I should also state that the research I’ve been trying to access is predominately psychological or social work academia (I’m a child protection caseworker), and I’m not sure if the same “share it if you got it” mantra applies in those fields.
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.:-)
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.
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?
Sci-Hub was the most similar exploitation of such "situation"
Too many small files, papers need different indexing.
Shadow libraries (like scihub, Anna's archive etc.) are the way to go - as long as scientists don't or can't publish Open Access which is what needs to happen.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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