
Ask HN: Why do we have to pay to read research funded from public funds? - arisAlexis
How did the academic and especially the medical sector come to a point that studies conducted by university hospitals and phd doctors are behind paywalls when it&#x27;s a matter of public health?<p>Is anyone doing anything about it? YC?
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pubmed1223
Officially there is a policy that NIH funded research must be publicly
available on the NIH repository (pubmed) within 1 year of a papers acceptance
[1]. How this remains enforced is a different question. Not sure how relevant
it is to other government funding sources. Also, a surprisingly, large amount
of academic research is not strictly publicly funded.

[1][https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm#753](https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm#753)

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moviuro
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17651419](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17651419)
and many more in recent HN posts...

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Rjevski
Because shitty companies like Elsevier still want to stick around even though
their purpose was obsoleted by the Internet, and are using their influence to
try and achieve that.

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Someone
How? See
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-
business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science)

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tonysdg
If there's a particular paper you're interested in, you can usually email the
lead author(s) and just ask for a copy. I've never heard of someone saying no,
especially since it's as easy as emailing a PDF.

As for the why -- just DuckDuckGo "why is science behind a paywall" and you'll
get a million hits, each author giving a slightly tweaked definition of "it's
a holdover from the days of publishing in print journals".

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itamarst
Capitalism turns public funding into a way to extract private profits.

