
Academics sharing paywalled papers with a codeword on Twitter - RobAley
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-34572462
======
kragen
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
_paid Elsevier page fees to publish it_. 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.)

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.

~~~
Asbostos
Scientists still love giving up their rights to Elsevier though. They're as
much to blame as the publisher.

Maybe something would start to happen if scientists preferentially avoided
citing non-openly published papers. They won't though, because their work is
too competitive, but it might help to put a damper on it.

~~~
masklinn
> Scientists still love giving up their rights to Elsevier though. They're as
> much to blame as the publisher.

Scientists don't love giving up their rights to Elsevier. Elsevier owns many
high IF journals in a number of fields, and publishing in high IF journals is
part of how you "prove your worth" and get grants. Scientists give up their
rights to Elsevier because that's how the "scientific economy" of their field
of study is currently structured.

~~~
baldfat
Professors are "expected" to be published in these journals in large
Universities. They basically will never advance their career without be
published in a "major journal."

~~~
DaveWalk
Early career academics are a slave to the system for career advancement; late
career (successful) academics are too complacent to want to change. The only
way the parent's idea will take root is if established academicians vote with
their own writing, and go on a mission to convince others in their sphere of
influence.

As you say, to do this as a young researcher is career suicide.

------
fermigier
In France, there is a proposal, backed by an overwhelming majority of
scientists, to mandate free and open access to scientific research results.

See: [https://www.republique-numerique.fr/consultations/projet-
de-...](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)

Hopefully this could end up in the Law next year.

~~~
mandor
... with a 6 months embargo (at best).

~~~
fermigier
No. Please read the amendment.

------
xefer
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.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
JupiterMoon
When you publish get generally get sent a stack of hard copies for
distribution to whoever you feel like sending to (usually far more than you
have people to send to). Sending the reprints is legal. Sending the pdf is
either illegal or legal or more likely a huge grey area which as an author you
can't be bothered to work out. Postage is free in most academic departments
and not much harder than sending an email. Therefore many would send the hard
copy...

~~~
montecarl
Several professors I know publish all their papers on their
university/government lab hosted website and have never received any take down
notices. When you use Google scholar to search for one of their papers there
is a link directly to the pdf hosted by them. Many professors feel that the
papers are theirs to redistribute as they wish even if copyright says
otherwise. But I do understand why some authors might feel wary of this.

~~~
rsfern
It depends on the publisher copyright agreement. With many closed journals,
the researcher is free to post a preprint on a personal site or to something
like arXiv, but not to post the final version with the journal's "value-added"
layout and such.

------
wolfgke
Relevant:

Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

>
> [https://ia700808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessM...](https://ia700808.us.archive.org/17/items/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf)

>
> [https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto](https://archive.org/details/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto)

~~~
DarkLinkXXXX
That first link will probably 404 within the year. The next time, you should
right click and copy the link, which hasn't been redirected.

[https://archive.org/download/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goa...](https://archive.org/download/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008.pdf)

~~~
wolfgke
Thanks.

------
ckozlowski
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.

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.

Just bemused.

~~~
anon4
They delete the tweets right after, so it's absolutely secure, don't worry
about it.

------
imrehg
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)

[1]: [https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar](https://www.reddit.com/r/scholar)

~~~
monort
And they have a link to a certain indispensable service, which uses university
proxies to download scientific papers.

------
ajuc
Good for them.

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.

~~~
stegosaurus
Mmm.

As a poor person growing up in Britain I hold the same viewpoint.

The whole argument around piracy and copyright seems to revolve around this
idea of being 'too cheap' or 'not wanting to support'.

When 10GBP for some music or 100+GBP for some software package (Office, for
example) is 50% or more of your monthly pay, or you have no income at all,
none of those factors come in to the decision. It's the only realistic way.
Would I download a car? Sure, if I could.

Thankfully nowadays with the proliferation of OSS it's much easier. And
personally I've been lucky enough that now I can afford such things. But to an
18 year old me, mumblings about 'lost profits' are just rich world problems.

~~~
kragen
Hopefully we will have an open-source car you can download and print soon!

~~~
psykovsky
We already have... [http://wikispeed.org/](http://wikispeed.org/)

~~~
kragen
Yeah, it's mostly the printer we lack.

------
Blahah
#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.

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
_thousands of dollars_ 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.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
cinquemb
> _Science is in something like turmoil as it adjusts to the internet._

I would think academia is in turmoil as it (mal)adjusts to the internet,
rather than science. Polymath project[0], and other initiatives are only
possible because of the internet.

Publishers act like gatekeepers of knowledge just like academia does with its
credentialing/signaling, and they are both complicit in that relationship,
which is increasingly moving towards obsolescence in a world where people talk
freely of such subjects online and can become informed and knowledgeable on
such subjects. One of the postdocs in my lab didn't even know sci-hub even
existed, until I, a degreeless researcher showed him. He was utterly reliant
upon his institutions and non scalable means of directly contacting
researchers before that point. I'd be fooling myself to think he's the only
one in his position who didn't know.

People are already finding incentives/ways to pursue knowledge, just like
people found other ways to pursue science when the church no longer became the
place to in the past. People are just routing around their present
institutions.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project)

------
OlafLostViking
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.

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.

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.

~~~
Asbostos
Prices for anything don't have to be justified. The market decides them. It
turns out that people really want to pay those publishers, so they can charge
high fees.

It also turns out scientists really want to publish their work in those
closed-access journals. Whatever attracts them to do that is what justifies
the high prices. What attracts them? Universities use them as a proxy to judge
job applicants. Blame universities for using such an expensive "interview"
process that permanently shafts much of the worlds scientific knowledge as a
side effect.

~~~
arbitrage
The market is being unfairly controlled by oligopolists, if not straight out
monopolists in many areas.

This is not free market doctrine. This is econ 101 on how to subvert the free
market.

~~~
refurb
How is it a monopoly situation? There are multiple journals out there where
scientists can publish their work. They could also start their own journal
(open-access if they like) without many barriers.

~~~
wolfgke
This is a two-sided market, where the publishers are the middlemen between
scientists publishing their results and readers of the papers.

You argue that the side scientists - publisher is a free market. I consider
this as dubious because of, say, impact factors, but for the sake of
argumentation, I'll accept it for now.

But the really interesting side of the market is not scientist - publisher,
but publisher - reader (this is what the original article is all about). And
this is part of the two-sided market clearly is a monopoly, since there is no
competition between publishers for a given paper, but there is only one
publisher that is allowed to sell access to a paper (thanks to the copyright
laws).

TLDR: Thanks to the copyright laws one side of the two-sided market is a
monopoly.

~~~
refurb
By that same argument, the computer market is a one-sided monopoly as well.
Apple and Apple alone produces and sells Apple computers.

~~~
kragen
You may want to look up "two-sided market".

------
dombili
It's a shame that people whose job is to advance humanity have to spend their
time dealing with crap like this.

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.

------
baghira
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.

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.

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).

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.

~~~
sawwit
> … _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._

I always thought publishing will be free/payed by taxes in an open access
world like on arXiv.org.

~~~
baghira
Right, but in that case you lose completely the crucial gatekeeping function.
Already now arxiv.org is full of papers with glaring technical and conceptual
mistakes. Imagine what would happen if submissions to arxiv.org where they way
one decides who to promote.

At the cost of being a retrograde, I believe that this sort of things cannot
be settled simply "the google way" i.e. 1\. Count the citations. 2\. Make a
list. 3\. Profit.

You need to "force" people to review their papers, correct mistakes, and in a
sense establish what is worth other people time. Journal editors and reviwers
screw up all the time, no doubt, but the burden of proof is on those arguing
that "drop it on arxiv, let the review count do the scoring" is a better
system.

Also, once you drag the taxpayer in, you have to figure out who polices the
archive, least it becomes crackpot central: should they be elected? Should
they be appointed? Who should pay them? What about conflicts of interest?

~~~
exgrv
Members of the editorial board of scientific journals are not paid. So nothing
prevents having a completely free and open access journal, which is peer
reviewed. As a matter of fact, such journals already exist in some fields
(e.g. the Journal of Machine Learning Research[1], which is the best journal
in machine learning).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Research)

~~~
baghira
Yes, but the editorial board is not the only cost component of a journal. I'm
somewhat skeptical of how much the model in which "the scientists" do all the
work of publishing a journal can scale, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong.

I'll admit my comment was influenced by some proposed models (e.g. in the UK),
arguing for the allocation of taxpayer resources to "buy" open access for
research.

~~~
sawwit
> I'm somewhat skeptical of how much the model in which "the scientists" do
> all the work of publishing a journal can scale, but I'd be glad to be proven
> wrong.

I'm quite optimistic. There are already strong explicit indicators for the
worth of a publication. If a paper comes from a university, for example, you
can likely already be assured that it's worth reading. If it has a name with
good reputation on it, that's an even better piece of evidence. If a paper has
interesting content, it will be shared in the community. Also, Google isn't
just ranking by a explicit measures, but mostly by PageRank, i.e. a measure
how how well a certain item is woven into the network of links (plus possibly
hundreds of heuristics). PageRank could likely be applied to a publication
system as well. In that case the network links could be co-authorships,
associations with accredited universities, and perhaps other things. And let
us not forget that the vast majority of researchers are actually truth seeking
and concerned about the impact they make on the world. Things might become a
little bit noisier, but at the same time the feedback-loops become shorter, as
we're seeing it in the machine learning field.

~~~
baghira
exgrv's commment, the way I read it, was arguing for something less radical:
"simply" insourcing the work of the journal publishers, and having it done by
scientists (maybe allocating more resources to scientists so that the workload
remains sane).

What you are proposing (arxiv.org + PageRank) is quite a shakeup. My
impression is that while pretty good at using the position in the graph to
establish relevance, such a model is much less effective at gauging quality
(which is the problem, if you want to use bibliometric scores as a way to
establish whose careers are to advance). In other term, the outcome of a
search for "cloud computing" is certainly pertinent with the subject. That is
_not_ how you would choose which cloud service to use.

Of course, it may well be possible that the human judgment component is
codifiable in a few hundred/thousand of heustics (sounds like a hard problem,
but it's not my field), thus allowing the construction of a good model.

~~~
sawwit
Intuitively I think, the problem is much simpler compared to web search
because it's a much smaller graph and each node gets checked against reality
in some sense, while on the market and on Google things mostly only get
compared with the competition under very obfuscated circumstances with
extremely weak feedback loops. PageRank is probably unnecessary for most areas
as they are small enough so that specialists can easily keep track of new
publications. It could just be a useful tool for listing a lot of
publications, but, as I said, measures like citation, review count and
reputation of the institution are probably pretty good on their own. It was
perhaps misleading that I've mentioned PageRank at all, it was just an idea
that I had at the time I wrote the comment.

------
mikegerwitz
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.

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".

[0]: [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-
avoid.en.html#Piracy](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-
avoid.en.html#Piracy)

~~~
webXL
> "I don't think it can be equated very easily to theft. Theft is when you
> take something and the owner loses possession. But in copyright
> infringement, you don't take anything from other people," Elbakya says.
> "Many university researchers need access to these papers because
> subscriptions are very expensive."

Ah, but you do take something from the people who are expecting to be paid for
their labor, according to the value the market has placed on it. By refusing
to pay, you are telling those people, "I think this is worth $0 so stop your
crying", in essence. But if it was really worth nothing, would you break the
law to get it?

------
oxide
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.

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.

~~~
cheepin
Grasping at straws is a strange way to say rolling in money. The Journals are
relics for sure, but with the internet their costs went down, and they make a
ton of money financed by tax-funded research.

------
omginternets
I'd love to see "popcorn time for scientific publications". Hint, hint.

~~~
DaveWalk
An interesting thought! It would take some resources to host the thousands of
journals out there, but fundamentally the problem is similar to hosting
movies, TV shows or music.

~~~
omginternets
>It would take some resources to host the thousands of journals out there

I actually think this would be fairly trivial.

For both practical and legal reasons, I think the way to do this would be to
have generic search/download/manage tool with a pluggable backend. Then,
anybody can write a plugin to scrape a particular host, and users can freely
download plugins.

This prevents the project from directly engaging in copyright infringement
("we make the tool. Sue the plugin creators, if you can find them.") and
distributes the task of hosting the files.

Besides, there are many free sources (e.g. PLoS) from which to start, and
there are already huge publication database dumps on bittorrent.

------
joesmo
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.

------
robotkilla
> The original tweet is deleted, so there's no public record of the paper
> changing hands.

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.

~~~
anon4
If I were making a secure file request/dropoff operation, I would host a chat
room on a TOR hidden service where you could ask for the material in question,
and a separate file server where you could upload the file. There would be a
client that encrypts the file client-side and uploads it to the service and a
client that downloads and decrypts. The uploader would post a link with the
key to the forum after uploading. Once the file is downloaded, it's deleted.
The two services would share no data with each other and appear as two
completely separate services. Of course, then you run into the problem of
having to moderate the thing, since you don't want to become a facilitator of
child pornography etc.

~~~
ohashi
[https://securesha.re/](https://securesha.re/)

------
amateurpolymath
Economists Ted Bergstrom and Preston McAfee (currently at Microsoft) have long
studied journal pricing. Here is Ted's page on the matter:
[http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/jpricing.html](http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/jpricing.html)

His table of particularly overpriced journals in economics is dominated by
Elsevier journals:
[http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/roguejournals02.html](http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/roguejournals02.html)

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:
[http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/alternatives.html](http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/%7Etedb/Journals/alternatives.html)

------
baldfat
Peer Review = Flawed
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/)

Tax Payer Money going to research not available to continue science = Flawed
Policy

How can an article about this not mention Aaron Schwartz?

~~~
masklinn
> Peer Review = Flawed
> [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/)

Then again, as per your article

> Nevertheless, it is likely to remain central to science and journals because
> there is no obvious alternative

And the problem outlined with TFA has little to do with peer-review, it has to
do with open access which is largely orthogonal.

~~~
baldfat
The opposing argument to Open and Free is that the main argument is that they
need money for journals because they are peer reviewed. Peer reviews cost
money. The integrity of the journal and science cost money. Therefore we are
befitting science by having a pay wall.

So they take grants and federal money put the results behind pay walls and say
they are doing us a service.

That is flawed.

~~~
masklinn
Again Open (access) and Free (publication) are largely orthogonal. For
instance PLOS journals are Open Access but not Free Publication, the
publication fees funding edition and review.

~~~
baldfat
Well I guess I don't see free and open as being opposing to each other. Now
there is the option of being Free as in Beer but I really believe with the
Internet we can have free and open. IF someone takes grant money from the
government the research should be both free from fees and not behind a paid
wall.

~~~
masklinn
> Well I guess I don't see free and open as being opposing to each other.

Orthogonal means independent, not opposing. You can have free and open, you
can have free and closed, you can have non-free and open and you can have non-
free and closed.

> IF someone takes grant money from the government the research should be both
> free from fees and not behind a paid wall.

Be as it may, even with mostly volunteers running a peer-reviewed journal has
costs, so unless governments start journal grants of sorts...

~~~
baldfat
you 100% right. I was thinking of Orthogonal lines :) 90 degrees to each
other.

~~~
masklinn
That's the origin, the simile is that orthogonal lines represent completely
disjoint sets and are uncorrelated, so one can be changed without impacting
the other. It's kinda weird, but there you are.

------
alkonaut
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 _elsewhere_ for free, if it's publicly funded research.

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 _or_ just have them accept that all the publicly
funded content will always be available outside their publications. It's as
simple as that.

A proposal requiring that publicly funded research is publicly available would
be _how hard_ to pass in as law? Why aren't such proposals made? If they are,
what has stopped it from already being law?

------
DaveWalk
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.

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], _one year after publication._ For most
researchers staying current, this is nearly useless.

[0] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/)

~~~
Fomite
I wouldn't say nearly useless.

For my "most cited" paper, the _vast_ bulk of the citations from said paper
took place several years after it went into open access because it was NIH
funded. Heck, "peak citation" was this year, a full 8 years after it was
published. The same general trend is true for my second most cited paper -
peak citation is several years after the fact.

Both of these papers were also trivially easy to find in PDF form online.

------
teekert
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.

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.

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.

Still loving the initiative though ;)

~~~
mandor
> I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed.

\- Reviews are always free (nobody gets paid for reviewing academic paper, in
contrast to grant proposal for which we are _sometimes_ paid)

\- I have not seen a printed version of a journal for a while (except the very
big ones like Nature or Science, but we buy them mostly for the news/view
section, not that much for the academic papers at the end)

\- Copy editors never did anything useful to my papers. In CS, we usually
submit a nice latex file and they do not really do any work on the layout (it
might be different in other fields, where people submit crappy MS Word files).

... so, let's say that the added value of the publisher (even for PLOS) is
marginal...

~~~
dumbmatter
So why do open access online-only publishers like PLoS charge $3k/article? Is
that just pure profit?

------
astaroth360
What reason is there that these paid journals need to exist?

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.

~~~
Fomite
There was a Academia Stack Exchange question on this very thing:
[http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/46354/what-is-
th...](http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/46354/what-is-the-point-of-
journals-nowadays)

My answer, from there:

They help support professional societies. Profits from society-level journals,
if they indeed do turn a profit, allow professional societies to engage in
other activities, from political advocacy to supporting students attending
their conferences.

They provide typesetting and layout, as well as proof reading. While this is
not true for all fields, generally speaking it is true in biomedicine and
public health. To my mind, all but the most carefully done LaTeX templates are
a poor substitute to actual page layout tools, and typesetting is something
that is not necessarily an academic skill set.

They provide a means for manditory, potentially blinded review. Most alternate
systems rely on optional post-publication review, whereas the conventional
journal system ensures somebody saw it before it reached the press. This might
seem like something of a low bar, but it's better than a paper that never
attracts reviewers. Additionally, it's essentially impossible to make post-
publication reviews anonymous. I'd suggest that the quality and level of
criticism for identical papers published by a "Senior Luminary in the Field"
and a "Female Graduate Student with a Foreign Sounding Name" will be markedly
different. This is just as subjective as the existing peer-review system. For
something like SX voting, you're also going to conflate two issues -
popularity and quality.

Journals, through their editorial boards, provide a means of field-wide
advocacy. I would, for example, suggest that the ICMJE Guidelines carry far
more weight because of the associated journals.

Journals also provide essentially a curated collection of papers that meet a
certain quality standard (whatever that standard may be) and are topical. I
can read Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology every month and get a
sense for what's going on in a particular field. And importantly, I can find
papers there that I wouldn't necessarily have read if I was just searching
through somewhere like arXiv. Journals provide a means to browse a field in
addition to targeted searches of the literature.

------
Kristine1975
The hashtag seems to have originated in 2012:
[http://www.altmetric.com/blog/interactions-the-numbers-
behin...](http://www.altmetric.com/blog/interactions-the-numbers-behind-
icanhazpdf/)

------
chrisBob
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.

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
_great_ at finding papers that I couldn't get through the official sources
with my school's access.

------
bluerobotcat
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.

------
RUG3Y
This is the age of the internet. We have no need for these publishing
middlemen. Knowledge like this should be shared freely for the public good.

------
yati
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?

~~~
DarkLinkXXXX
To be concise, your qualifications for a university may depend on what
journals you publish your articles in, and how "prestigious" they are.

~~~
johansch
The obvious solution would be for countries to pass laws that force any
publicly funded research to be published for free download in addition to
whatever fancy journal the researches submits them to.

------
schoen
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.

------
norswap
Nowadays there's also [http://booksc.com](http://booksc.com)

------
raverbashing
Good!

Even better, publish your articles 'for free'

------
xacaxulu
Information wants to be free.

~~~
krapp

        "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. 
         The right information in the right place just changes your life. 
         On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting 
         it out is getting lower and lower all the time. 
         So you have these two fighting against each other."
    

... would be the actual quote in its entirety, which describes an inherent
conflict between the value of information and the cost of distribution, not
"information freedom" as being a law of nature in and of itself.

------
c3534l
Aww. Scientists are adorable.

