
65 out of the 100 most cited papers are paywalled - jmnicholson
https://www.authorea.com/users/8850/articles/125400-65-out-of-the-100-most-cited-papers-are-paywalled
======
aalleavitch
This is by far one of the most frustrating things to me about the current
structure of the scientific community. Making all published research free to
access for everyone would be a massive benefit to the general education of
society and would allow anyone regardless of institutional affiliation to be
involved in the process of science. Imagine how much better science reporting
would be if every popular science article was expected to link directly to the
full papers they were referencing.

As someone who hasn't been involved with a university or a laboratory for many
years, I find myself continually extremely frustrated by how difficult it can
be for me to keep up with new developments in the fields I studied in college.

~~~
SiVal
I agree, and I'll explicitly add "history" as a part of "science" in the
research sense you meant. I'm having a heck of a time trying to access
historical records of medieval England from here in Silicon Valley because,
although the information I need (land deeds, court records, etc.) was
uncovered & translated by Victorian historians, and much of it exists in both
text and image form and is ALREADY ONLINE in Google Books, the various English
universities & their presses, English historical associations, libraries,
etc., all jealously guard the information instead of releasing it, even to the
point of preventing Google from showing it.

Example: Cambridge Univ Press takes books that were Victorian databases of
medieval records, and in the name of "protecting our precious history", they
just photocopy the Victorian pages, reprint them on newer paper, and put them
under new copyright. If you want to look something up in the 10-volume
database, then either blindly buy the $300 set of books and hope to find some
items of interest scattered therein or go to the nearest library that has the
full set, which turns out to be on the other side of the planet at Leeds Uni
in Yorkshire, which will allow you to see these ancient texts printed in 2013
if you pay for library use and make an appointment at least 2 days in
advance....

Meanwhile, the full text of the books is on Google Books at Google's expense
and available in any browser, but Google is forced by the "protectors of
history" at Cambridge to cloak many of the pages of 1000-yr-old data, because
history is too precious to allow the unworthy to see their photocopied
Victorian texts without first going on an old-fashioned quest, bribing the
boatman, answering the troll's three questions, etc.

My hope is that at some point there will be a cultural change among
"historical preservation" organizations where they decide that the greatest
thing they can do to promote their field is to find every original document in
every collection, carefully photograph it in hi-rez using whatever optical
frequencies bring out the most faded detail, and contribute it to a free
online host. Next step is then to create and freely post transcriptions,
translations, and indexes, so that ANYONE can use the data for research, not
just those who have enough gold in their purse, time for the quest, and can
"answer me these questions three".

~~~
jl6
I’m with you, but the reason these documents aren’t free and online is money,
of course. These archives, libraries and institutions are chronically
underfunded. Scanning is expensive. They use copyright as revenue generation
to plug the gap. I’m certain the academics that work there would love to
publish all of history online for free, as long as you can tell them where
their salary is going to come from.

~~~
SiVal
I agree with everything you said, so I'm just adding some thoughts.

I'm trying to do historical research at my own expense and, like many others,
will continue to do so as long as I can get access to raw data. Google will
provide much of the data for free, and I (and MANY others) will do the
analysis for free. It's another "open source" vs "commercial" situation. No
one is required to give me expensive stuff for free, BUT if OTHERS are willing
to pay the costs to scan, host, and provide it to everyone for free, but the
"protectors of our precious heritage" won't allow it, it's no longer about the
love of history but more like a repetition of history: we've got the power, so
pay us for our, uh, "services".

As for scanning costs, though, Google is already scanning and hosting many of
these materials for free and are being actively prevented from doing more (and
even showing what they've already scanned), so I suspect we aren't far from
having all we need for a 21st Century equivalent of a Carnegie Foundation. If
Andrew Carnegie could build public libraries around the world, the robber
barons of our century could fund an online Library of Alexandria to serve as a
central repository. They could then offer to museums, private collectors,
etc., to do the scanning and hosting and maybe even some ad sponsorship or
donation mechanism to provide a small income stream back to the owners of the
originals.

------
StavrosK
Fund SciHub!

What I'd like to see is an IPFS feature that showed the "least shared" files
in a set, so you could say "I want to help host the rarest 10 GB", for
example.

~~~
toomuchtodo
You can do this, as all of SciHub is available as torrents.

Edit: you should be able to find the URLs with some googling, not going to
post them here

~~~
StavrosK
The problem with that is that you can't serve content directly over HTTP from
a torrent, whereas with IPFS you can.

~~~
shpx
[https://webtorrent.io](https://webtorrent.io)

~~~
StavrosK
[https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmNmrNkyLygYDt9t5ptXkukPdpGSabLB...](https://www.eternum.io/ipfs/QmNmrNkyLygYDt9t5ptXkukPdpGSabLByG9tYKZ5kyTTkq)

Which UX is better?

~~~
toomuchtodo
More importantly, webtorrent is a client side hack when clients should be
using webseeding [1], which is baked into torrent clients that use libtorrent.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent#Web_seeding)

------
coldcode
If you can't read it it doesn't exist. Research results are meant to be
available and visible to all, or they are someone's private science diary.
Also I believe that Nobel prizes should not be given out to be people whose
research is not available to the general public.

------
philipkglass
The top 10 paywalled articles are all from the 20th century. The Open Access
movement is great but it doesn't do anything to free up papers from the past.

A large part of the problem is the ridiculous duration of copyright.
"Adsorption of Gases in Multimolecular Layers" is from _1938_ and still
paywalled.

In practice, almost all papers this popular will be available on random .edu
sites and Google Scholar will find those technically-forbidden copies for you.
But it is a significant problem if you don't have an institutional affiliation
and you want to read articles that _aren 't_ among the top 5% cited. (Or at
least it was a problem for me before sci-hub; I retained academic contacts who
could email me any papers I wanted, but I had to cross a pretty high interest
threshold before I'd bug someone to request that favor.)

------
Simulacra
Without SciHub and my access at MIT, most of the research I depend on would be
out of bounds.

------
seccess
So, I tried to see if I could read some of the articles marked "paywall" and I
had no trouble. My methodology: Google Scholar search the article title, and
click the direct "PDF" link on the right side.

Eg:
[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Tissue+sulfhydryl+group...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Tissue+sulfhydryl+groups)

EDIT: My point here is that the statement in the article "the world’s most
important research is inaccessible from the majority of the world" isn't
exactly true. This isn't supposed to be an endorsement of academic publishing
practices: if anything the fact that these publishers are effectively trying
to scam readers out of money is all the more evident.

~~~
gwern
I took a look at all 65 papers listed as paywalls.

Of them, 5 are actually available directly from the publisher so they
shouldn't be listed as paywalls, and all of the remainder are available from
at least one of Google Scholar/Google/Libgen; of the 60 actually-paywall
papers, 54 are available from GS/G and only 6 force you to go all the way to
Libgen. (I am taking the liberty of rehosting 10 of them myself, though, to
get them into GS.)

Of the 65, notes on the ones not immediately available in GS:

> Density-functional thermochemistry. III. The role of exact exchange

Citation-only in Google Scholar but easily found in Google or SH/LG.

> Detection of specific sequences among DNA fragments separated by gel-
> electrophoresis

Paywall-only in Google Scholar, not immediately available in Google but easily
gotten from SH/LG.

> Processing of X-ray diffraction data collected in oscillation mode

GS paywall-only, not in Google, but SH/LG.

> Isolation of biologically active ribonucleic acid from sources enriched in
> ribonuclease

Likewise.

> the attractions of proteins for small molecules and ions

Likewise.

> Helical microtubules of graphitic carbon

GS links to paywall but findable in G.

> A technique for radiolabeling DNA restriction endonuclease fragments to high
> specific activity

GS/G paywall but SH/LG.

> Phase annealing in SHELX-90: direct methods for larger structures

I am not sure why this one was listed as 'paywall' when it appears to be
available directly from the publisher:
[http://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/1990/06/00/an0278/an0278.p...](http://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/1990/06/00/an0278/an0278.pdf)

> A study of the conditions and mechanism of the diphenylamine reaction for
> the colorimetric estimation of deoxyribonucleic acid

Also directly available:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1215910/pdf/bio...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1215910/pdf/biochemj00860-0145.pdf)

> Multiple range and multiple F tests

Also directly available (possibly with a free JSTOR account but if not,
SH/LG):
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3001478.pdf](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3001478.pdf)

> A new look at the statistical model identification

GS paywall but G & SH/LG.

> Improved M13 phage cloning vectors and host strains: nucleotide sequences of
> the M13mpl8 and pUC19 vectors

Likewise.

> Nitric oxide: physiology, pathophysiology, and pharmacology

G/GS paywall but SH/LG.

> An algorithm for least-squares estimation of nonlinear parameters

GS paywall but G & SH/LG

> A low-viscosity epoxy resin embedding medium for electron microscopy

GS/G paywall but SH/LG.

> Continuous cultures of fused cells secreting antibody of predefined
> specificity

G, and directly available:
[http://www.jimmunol.org/content/jimmunol/174/5/2453.full.pdf](http://www.jimmunol.org/content/jimmunol/174/5/2453.full.pdf)

> Homeostasis model assessment: insulin resistance and β-cell function from
> fasting plasma glucose and insulin concentrations in man

Directly available:
[https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF00280883.pdf](https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/BF00280883.pdf)

~~~
poizan42
> > Phase annealing in SHELX-90: direct methods for larger structures

> I am not sure why this one was listed as 'paywall' when it appears to be
> available directly from the publisher: >
> [http://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/1990/06/00/an0278/an0278.p...](http://journals.iucr.org/a/issues/1990/06/00/an0278/an0278.pdf)

It pops up a http authentication box for me.

> > Multiple range and multiple F tests

> Also directly available (possibly with a free JSTOR account but if not,
> SH/LG):

>
> [https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3001478.pdf](https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3001478.pdf)

You can only view 3 free items every 14 days, wouldn't call that exactly
freely available.

~~~
gwern
> It pops up a http authentication box for me.

Might be referral-based. Try searching the title and going from the abstract.

> You can only view 3 free items every 14 days, wouldn't call that exactly
> freely available.

There's no verification of .edu addresses or anything, so you can make as many
as you need. I wouldn't call that exactly paywalled either.

------
beedogs
We should all be supporting Sci-Hub. There is no reason for these papers to be
locked away from the public.

------
jwilk
Archived copy, which can be read with JS disabled:

[https://archive.is/hlFg1](https://archive.is/hlFg1)

------
chasedehan
As a former professor I don't see much of an issue with this. Every research
institution on the planet will have access to the articles.

Even if you don't have an affiliation (or your school doesn't subscribe to a
particular journal), if you use Google Scholar to search for an article you
can easily find pre-prints which are essentially the same thing. Additionally,
if that still fails then the next option is to just email the author - they
actually want you to read their work and will just send it out.

The real issue is that the societies are essentially extorting universities
for hundreds of thousands of dollars per year when the writers have to pay to
submit and readers have to pay to read. Many of the newer journals are
becoming open access, but few of them have been able to make enough in roads
to be considered "good journals." This is a completely separate topic than the
one from the above article.

~~~
folli
I personally do see an issue if we make knowledge only accessible to a
minority of people.

In my field (microbiology/bioinformatics), it's almost impossible to find pre-
prints of pay walled papers and emailing the authors and hoping that they will
respond at all also doesn't seem an extremely efficient process for literature
research.

~~~
chasedehan
Maybe I am biased by my field - economics - in which even having "access"
doesn't mean they are "accessible." There are very very few people without a
PhD who are able to understand most of the good papers. There is an even
smaller number who would be able to contribute to scientific discourse, which
is the main reason these papers are made available.

The other thing that may only be localised to my field is that every author
recognizes this problem and makes a copy available on their website or
university's working paper site. I would only rarely resort to going to an
actual journal because Google Scholar was way easier to find a copy of the
article.

This is, of course, going to differ for a number of fields and there is a
growing trend for authors and journals to open up their articles.

------
Houshalter
Copyright desperately needs reform. It's silly we treat completely different
areas with the same set of rules. From code to movies to math papers. Fine,
let the Mouse be protected indefinitely. But nonfiction works have objective
value to society. It's insane that 100 year old scientific works are still
copyrighted and paywalled. It's wrong that you can be sued and even go to
prison for spreading and preserving humanities knowledge.

~~~
aalleavitch
The internet makes a lot of the concepts behind copyright fundamentally
ridiculous. We honestly need to rewrite many of the rules from the ground up
to take into account modern technology and what would best benefit society
given the accessibility of information.

------
laichzeit0
Yeah and how many are still inaccessible with scihub or libgen? I have access
through my university to most journals but I always use scihub because it’s
the easiest and fastest way to access any paper.

------
dredmorbius
Answering the question "Why is Sci-Hub so popular?":

Because it works. It delivers information and knowledge to those who need it.

Because information and knowledge are public goods. As CUNY/GC says, an
"increasingly unpopular idea",1,2,3 but an absolutely correct one.

Because it democratises information.

Because much the world cannot afford to pay US/EU/JP/AU prices for content.
Including many of those in the US/EU/JP/AU. And most certainly virtually all
outside. Billions and billions of people.

Because the research is (often) publicly funded, conducted in public
institutions, and meant for the public.

Because information and markets simply don't work.
[https://redd.it/2vm2da](https://redd.it/2vm2da)

Deadweight losses from restricted access and perverse incentives for
publication both taint the system.

Because much the content, EVERYTHING published before 1962, would have been
public domain under the copyright law in force at the time, and much up
through 1976 and the retrospective extensions of copyright it, and multiple
subsequent copyright acts, have created.

Because 30% profit margins are excessive by any measure. Greed, in this case,
is not good.

Because the interfaces to existing systems, a patchwork fragment of poorly
administered, poorly designed, limited-access, and all partial systems are
frankly far more tedious to navigate than Sci-Hub: Submit DOI or URL, get
paper.

Because unaffiliated independent research is a thing.

Because the old regime is absolutely unsustainable. It will die. It is dying
as we write this.

Because the roles of financing research and publication need not parallel the
activity of accessing content. Ronald Coase's "Theory of the Firm" (1937, ), a
paper which should be public domain today under the law in which it was
created and published, and should have been by 1991 at the latest, but isn't,
tells us why: transactions themselves have costs. [http://sci-
hub.ac/http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abs...](http://sci-
hub.ac/http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract%95id=2308556)

Because journals no longer serve a primary role as publishers of academic
material, but as gatekeepers over academic professional advancement. This
perpetrates multiple pathologies: papers don't advance knowledge, academics
are blackmailed into the system, and access to knowledge is curtailed

Because what the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls
"research".

Notes

See GC Presents, "At the Graduate Center, we believe knowledge is a public
good. This idea inspires our research, teaching, and public events. We invite
you to join us for timely discussions, diverse cultural perspectives, and
thought-provoking ideas." [https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Public-Programming/GC-
Presents](https://www.gc.cuny.edu/Public-Programming/GC-Presents)

See GC President Chase F. Robinson, introducing a conversation between Paul
Krugman and Olivier Blanchard. A rare moment where the introduction itself
contains some provocative thoughts. At about 50s into the video. (The
remaining 72 minutes and 20 seconds aren't bad either if you're interested in
discussions of global economics.)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zndOEQnMC44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zndOEQnMC44)

Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods:
International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg,
Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325.
[http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343...](http://s1.downloadmienphi.net/file/downloadfile6/151/1384343.pdf)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/)

(This has proved to be among my more popular articles, including being picked
up by the Open Access community.)

------
zitterbewegung
The best thing I learned in university was to figure out how to get paywalled
articles for free. This involved looking through arxiv and looking for the
authors website .

------
Feniks
Libgen.

------
CapacitorSet
Relevant:

[SciHub]([https://scihub.org/](https://scihub.org/)) is a project to "provide
free access to research articles and latest research information without any
barrier". It can also be used via Telegram at @scihubot.

~~~
diggan
Huh, didn't recognize the URL for Sci-Hub but then realized this is not THE
sci-hub but another one who stole it's name. Correct URL would be
[https://sci-hub.cc/](https://sci-hub.cc/)

~~~
CapacitorSet
My apologies, I googled "scihub" and picked the first result in English.

------
lunchladydoris
Those numbers seem a little disingenuous. If you work at a decent university
you're not paying $20 to access every article.

Plus, I'd be stunned if all the people making the citations actually read the
full paper. Some papers are cited because everyone knows you need to cite
them.

~~~
Feniks
Daily reminder that universities are funded by society. As are a lot of those
papers...

So yes you ARE paying. Just not directly.

~~~
SiVal
And if you're part of the 99% of us who AREN'T working at a university but
still funding their research with taxes, we have to pay both the taxes AND the
direct fees to access the papers.

