Sci Hub and Library Genesis for those who don’t want to feed the leeches
Also, if you’re not in a rush, just email the authors!
A vast majority of professors and researchers hate the publishing industry as much as anyone, and will be happy to shoot you a pdf if you’re interested in their work!
The worst that happens is they say no
this is often poor dating advice, but this time it’s good advice :)
When I need it, I know how to pirate, but I am privileged enough in terms of my institution that I can get most of anything I want (I mostly pirate for family needing niche things in engineering, and I am in the humanities). BUT, I had this one occasion that both validated my feelings about the system and fucking infuriated me. A professor from an institution that did not have the right subscriptions emailed me asking for an article I published, because they wanted to assign it for a seminar, but could not legitimately access it. That made me lose my shit. I didn’t get paid, neither did the editors or peer reviewers, but you know, god forbid someone read it for free. Which is when I realized I didn’t even have final copy myself, so I had to go to JS**, download it, spend some time cleaning the “downloaded from XYZ.XYZ.XYZ.XYZ address at XYZ institution” footers on the PDF, sent It to them and encourage them to further pirate that shit
Also, aren’t a majority of studies like this, funded with public money ?
Yes. However, if you find a paper or study you’re interested in reading, reach out to the researcher directly. More often than not, they’re happy to provide you with a copy for free, in my experience.
I did this once. They wouldn’t give me a copy, I didn’t push it because they were retired and did try to give me advice about contacting librarians to add the journal to their subscription.
I do imagine younger people publishing more recent work would be more open to sharing their work.
For anyone else seeing this the university of the author often also publishes their papers free access. Even when the journal the paper is published in is paywalled. So it’s worth checking that. This is especially the case if the work was funded by bodies that require open access.
That’s wild. I’ve always sent people copies when they reach out. It’s especially easy to do so with ResearchGate, but that does require the requester make an account there.
Another option is to ask a librarian to find that specific article, rather than getting them to subscribe to the journal. I had to do this once in grad school for an article in a discontinued journal from the 70s. The librarian found another library that had it and they faxed a copy.
That’s good advice. Have you found that there’s peer-review included when it’s university published? I’ve only received original research from contacting the researcher directly.
Not only do you write the article for free, they will also charge you for the privilege of publishing in their journal.
Depends on the publishing method you choose. If you want free for readers, authors pay. If you want free publishing, readers pay. Reviewers never get paid. Editors get paid shit. Journals profit massively for doing barely anything. Terrible in all directions. Preprint servers are the future
Was the article really written for free or was it written with tax-payer funded government grants?
RIP Aaron Swartz
Oprah’s just thinking about how to get her own publishing company into that business.
She knows a good scam when she sees it.
