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Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own research and papers for free as part of their standard contracts with the big journals? If not, then magne

Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own research and papers for free as part of their standard contracts with the big journals? If not, then magnet links make sense; researchers can then seed their own papers, and by downloading from them, you're essentially downloading a paper with their consent. And of course the magnet links isolate sci-hub. And it provides necessary and practical non-piracy validity to torrenting, which helps keep that protocol alive further.

mixedmath 6y ago
I give out every paper I've published for free. Well, actually every paper I've published is also available in essentially final form on the arxiv, so I'm not a necessary middleman. But I read a lot of papers from a lot of people that don't make their papers freely available and who don't use the arxiv (or any other preprint server). This seems particularly common for people a bit older than me. And of course there is the set of papers published more than 20 years ago, say, but which are still paywalled (or worse, essentially impossible to find anywhere). For these, scihub is great.
marcosdumay 6y ago
> Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own research and papers for free as part of their standard contracts with the big journals? Yes. Most do it anyway. I never heard about any journal persecuting a contributor for sharing their own paper, but they are almost always prohibited from doing that, even when it's free on the journal's site.
- _Wintermute 6y ago
  You're allowed to distribute it to individuals on request but not just host it on your own personal website for everyone to access. This is how researchgate tries to legally get around publishers by making this request a case of clicking a button for both the requester and author of the paper.
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    I'm not allowed to distribute anything that I ever published (what is not much), but yes, I think that one rule has more variance.

mixedmath 6y ago

I give out every paper I've published for free. Well, actually every paper I've published is also available in essentially final form on the arxiv, so I'm not a necessary middleman. But I read a lot of papers from a lot of people that don't make their papers freely available and who don't use the arxiv (or any other preprint server). This seems particularly common for people a bit older than me. And of course there is the set of papers published more than 20 years ago, say, but which are still paywalled (or worse, essentially impossible to find anywhere). For these, scihub is great.

marcosdumay 6y ago

> Are scientists prohibited from distributing their own research and papers for free as part of their standard contracts with the big journals? Yes. Most do it anyway. I never heard about any journal persecuting a contributor for sharing their own paper, but they are almost always prohibited from doing that, even when it's free on the journal's site.

_Wintermute 6y ago
You're allowed to distribute it to individuals on request but not just host it on your own personal website for everyone to access. This is how researchgate tries to legally get around publishers by making this request a case of clicking a button for both the requester and author of the paper.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  I'm not allowed to distribute anything that I ever published (what is not much), but yes, I think that one rule has more variance.