The only "online piracy" I see here is when Elsevier demands US$30 from you to get a copy of a paper written by scientists paid for by your tax dollars, who <i>paid Elsevier page fees to publish it</i>. Elsevier and similar companies are the thieves here, and they have a hell of a lot of nerve to be accusing scientists of "stealing" and "piracy" for working to create the very knowledge Elsevier shamelessly exploits. (Even Elsevier's very name is a theft: they are attempting to free-ride on the goodwill of the Elzevir family of Renaissance publishers, who have no connection with them.)<p>Do they have the law on their side? Yeah. So did the Pope when he sentenced Galileo to life in prison for promoting heliocentrism. That doesn't mean they're in the right; that means the law is in the wrong.
In France, there is a proposal, backed by an overwhelming majority of scientists, to mandate free and open access to scientific research results.<p>See: <a href="https://www.republique-numerique.fr/consultations/projet-de-loi-numerique/consultation/consultation/opinions/section-2-travaux-de-recherche-et-de-statistique/article-9-acces-aux-travaux-de-la-recherche-financee-par-des-fonds-publics/versions/proteger-le-droit-des-auteurs-d-articles-scientifiques-pour-permettre-le-libre-acces-a-la-recherche-scientifique" rel="nofollow">https://www.republique-numerique.fr/consultations/projet-de-...</a><p>Hopefully this could end up in the Law next year.
I've had over 100% luck emailing papers' authors directly asking for a copy of a particular paper I've been interested in reading. I typically get a PDF emailed back to me.<p>I say "over 100%" because several times I've had hard copies sent for whatever reason with hand-written letters thanking me for expressing interest in their research and letting me know they'd be happy to answer any questions, etc.<p>I've generally found that some researchers, especially in relatively arcane areas are very pleased to find people who are genuinely interested in their work.<p>I only appeal to authors directly if I'm unable to access a paper online through my library's JSTOR access which is fairly extensive.
Apologies in advance, but when I saw this link, I expected to find an article with a non-nondescript phrase ("Blue Iguana" or some such) that would tip people off to meet in an unlisted IRC room or some such.<p>I realize not everyone is on top of internet culture and slang, but reading "#icanhazpdf" is a "secret codeword" makes me wonder if the whole piece is tongue-in-cheek ("I am shocked, absolutely shocked to find gambling in here!") or if the author really has discovered the internet for the first time.<p>Just bemused.
There's also /r/scholar[1], which does the same thing, and so far working really very well (for me as a physicist out of academia at the moment)<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar</a>
Good for them.<p>Living in developing country you learn to ignore copyright or you never learn anything. I don't know if it was invented as a way for developed countries to keep competive advantage, but it sure would work that way if people actually obeyed.
#icanhazdf, Sci-Hub, libgen, etc. are all symptoms of the disease. Science is in something like turmoil as it adjusts to the internet. Of course, the rest of the world has already adjusted to the internet - science hasn't because publishers have used their monopoly over our scientific knowledgebase to systematically prevent progress.<p>Some food for thought: science is mostly funded by public money. A small portion of that money goes to paying scientists - the rest goes on products and services bought in the process of research. Some of these are necessary. But publishing takes a large chunk of that funding stream - they charge us <i>thousands of dollars</i> to put articles we write on their website. In almost all cases they add no value at all. Then, they charge us, and anybody else, to read what we wrote.<p>But maybe it just costs that much? There are two issues here: firstly, for-profit academic publishers have some of the highest profit margins of any large business (35-40%). Secondly, they are charging thousands of dollars for something that with modern technology should be nearly free. They are technically incompetent to the extreme - not capable of running an internet company that really serves the needs of science or scientists.<p>They systematically take money that was intended to pay for science, and they do it by a mixture of exploiting their historical position as knowledge curators and abusing intellectual property law. They also work very hard to keep the system working how it is (why wouldn't they? $_$) - by political pressure, by exploitative relationships with educations institutions, by FUD, and by engineering the incentive structure of professional science by aggressively promoting 'glamour' and 'impact' publications as a measure of success.<p>The biggest publishers are holding science back, preventing progress to maximise their profit. We need to cut them out, and cut them down. Take back our knowledge and rebuild the incentives and mechanisms of science without them being involved.
I'm in the lucky position to have access to most publications legally. But I cannot imagine what to do if our library wouldn't have subscriptions. The prices most publishers are demanding are insanely high and simply not financable if you need just a dozen papers or so.<p>Especially considering that the research and the the writing is done by scientists, the review is done by other scientists. For free. The writers even pay a lot of money to get published. So I wonder what justifies these price tags for offering a PDF for download.<p>Don't get me wrong - I can still see the role of a publisher in the scientific world. But perhaps the monetarization should be overworked... As the article said: let's see how this whole publishing world will change. Open Access and comparable models are becoming more and more popular.
It's a shame that people whose job is to advance humanity have to spend their time dealing with crap like this.<p>I'm glad they've found a workaround but that being said, opening a PDF attachment coming from god knows where isn't the best idea. I hope they're being careful.
It puzzles me that the most significant problem with open access receives little mention, in discussions on HN: it changes the incentives structure of publication, from one where the publisher has to please the ones buying the journal to one where the it has to please the people paying to submit articles.<p>This is what makes the situation profoundly more complex compared to other application of copyright, say in the software industry, where clearly switching to an open source model doesn't change the incentives i.e. who assesses the quality of software.<p>The long term effects on academia of switching to a model where the taxpayer gives money to scientists to pay for open access submssion of their research are hard to evaluate, and do no get enough though (imho).<p>That clearly doesn't mean that there aren't bad journals that are not OA, nor that for the benefit of the public some sort of arrangement shouldn't be found for older research: I'm a big believer in "faster decaying" copyright in general, and mandating that all publications describing research that is publicly funded become OA after, say, 30 years, would help significantly.
Fundamentally, we're talking about the dissemination of knowledge. Yes, it is copyright infringement, but calling this "piracy" immediately associates this act with both theft and brutal disregard for the law.[0] That is not what is happening here.<p>With that said---I'm a Nature subscriber, and I'm pleased to see the emphasis on "Open Access" by many scientists and organizations. Hopefully this trend will continue, and silly issues like individuals requesting PDFs from fellow scientists won't be termed "piracy".<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Piracy" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.en.html#Piracy</a>
This is 2015. The idea that we need to make sure a company is steeped in ill-gotten profit so that information can be disseminated is absolutely laughable.<p>The internet has brought a new method of information dissemination, a free method. not only are for-profit scientific journals outdated relics by now, but they're clearly aware of that fact and grasping for straws to stay relevant.
This is an excellent argument for piracy as a learning tool and against the current trend in copyright law (see TPP, etc.). I really see no difference between this and someone pirating content with the intent to learn (like my teenage self). I wish our society did more to encourage the extremely few people who actually want to learn, want to better themselves, and have something to contribute to society instead of criminalizing their activities. It'd be one thing if the government provided alternatives, but at least in the US, you won't even get taught basic math properly in many schools, let alone anything that might actually stimulate minds. Is it any wonder then that the government does so much to protect the "intellectual property" (whatever that means) rights of corporations but does nothing to protect the IP rights to scientific research, including research paid for? Even a simple law, requiring government funded research to be publicly, freely available would go a long way, assuming it actually was freely available, not 'freely available for $50 / paper' or whatever the lawmakers want to redefine 'freely' to mean.
> The original tweet is deleted, so there's no public record of the paper changing hands.<p>Why is it assumed that there is no public record of the paper changing hands? They tweet the request publicly, so it stands to reason that someone is paying attention and archiving. I suppose the key word here is "public", but I'm not sure why that matters if the goal is covering up illegal activity.
Economists Ted Bergstrom and Preston McAfee (currently at Microsoft) have long studied journal pricing. Here is Ted's page on the matter: <a href="http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/jpricing.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/jpricing.html</a><p>His table of particularly overpriced journals in economics is dominated by Elsevier journals: <a href="http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/roguejournals02.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/roguejournals02.html</a><p>Hopefully we see more academics collectively abandoning such journals like Knuth and the Journal of Algorithms board and these other examples from Ted's website: <a href="http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/alternatives.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/alternatives.html</a>
Peer Review = Flawed <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/</a><p>Tax Payer Money going to research not available to continue science = Flawed Policy<p>How can an article about this not mention Aaron Schwartz?
I don't see any problem with having Elsevier manage publications that prevent people from copying their content. Just as long as that content is also available <i>elsewhere</i> for free, if it's publicly funded research.<p>I assume the problem is that Elsevier doesn't much like when articles are also made available outside their publications? Well, then either starve them of all publicly funded content <i>or</i> just have them accept that all the publicly funded content will always be available outside their publications. It's as simple as that.<p>A proposal requiring that publicly funded research is publicly available would be <i>how hard</i> to pass in as law? Why aren't such proposals made? If they are, what has stopped it from already being law?
For what it's worth, this has been going on for at least 10 years in my experience. It's existence isn't so much news to me -- but it's news that it's still around.<p>In the life sciences, the NIH has personally dealt with several publishers on this issue. The result is that many large journals will ultimately open up their archives on PubMedCentral[0], <i>one year after publication.</i> For most researchers staying current, this is nearly useless.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/</a>
I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed. This is not free. Perhaps we should agree that the publishing group pays for the entire cost of the article so that it can be free after the process of publishing it? Or boycot paywalled publishers, maybe go for PLOS? If you have ever complained about paywalls, don't ever publish in a paywalled journal yourself.<p>I'm all for free papers by the way, nothing is more annoying that researching things and hitting paywalls but someone has got to pay the people doing the publishing work.<p>Also: If I order a paper from our library or I download it myself, it often comes with an on the fly generated cover page with my IP address on it. One can remove that, certainly but there may be other mechanisms to tag papers. Amazon reportedly investigated (and implemented?) putting specific, unique errors in DRM free ebook copies to identify sources of piracy. So I wouldn't advice you to just send the PDF around unless you are the author maybe and have a PDF that did not go through the publishing process.<p>Still loving the initiative though ;)
What reason is there that these paid journals need to exist?<p>Apparently there are tons of BS papers in them anyway, so what exactly is it that the scientist is paying the journal for if not for good peer review? It seems to me that the journals provide very little that a free online version wouldn't do better.
The hashtag seems to have originated in 2012: <a href="http://www.altmetric.com/blog/interactions-the-numbers-behind-icanhazpdf/" rel="nofollow">http://www.altmetric.com/blog/interactions-the-numbers-behin...</a>
I upload my papers through Researchgate. I know that it may not be legal to do so, but it is password protected, and hasn't been challenged by too many publishers. Sharing this way makes great sense for the author. You want people to read your paper, and it gives a way to do so. You must create an account, but many papers that would otherwise be blocked can be found this way.<p>The other trick I recommend people try if they frequently have trouble finding papers is to try EndNote. It is a little expensive, but I found it to be <i>great</i> at finding papers that I couldn't get through the official sources with my school's access.
I was expecting the secret codeword to be 'preprint'. When I was in academia not too long ago, I would often ask authors for the preprint of this or that paper, and they'd usually send it back promptly.
I've never published a paper, and can't understand why we need actors like Elsevier and other paywalls for scientific research publication. What motivates scientists to use a publisher's services? Can't these be replicated by setting up a government publication house?
It's funny to see something of the outside view. I suspect people reading this on HN are much more likely to understand "I can haz", as well as easily relate to the scientists' point of view.