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.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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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?
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.:-)
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.
Too many small files
Not as many small files as many games have, and people have figured out how to torrent those... 😂(just compress it in a zip or similar)
I meant you'd have too many torrents (each consisting of 1 small file)...
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.
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).