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Yes, it’s a new and better world. On the other side of the $275 per-paper Elsevier paywall, there are researchers who wish more people would read their papers.
by ehvatum 5y ago
Yes, it’s a new and better world. On the other side of the $275 per-paper Elsevier paywall, there are researchers who wish more people would read their papers. In my experience digging into robotics kinematics, authors are happy to answer questions and can point me to the right person when I want to send a check to support investigating specific research questions. The paywall deceives; science is neither an institution nor a copyright. It’s people. You can talk to them. You can learn from them and they can learn from you. When you apply their research, they often want to know about it! They might even discuss your application, in future papers. You don’t have to be Siemens or Big University Labs. The situation with for-profit journal publishers is diseased. Who the hell do they think they are? Elsevier should be dead, and Aaron Swartz should be alive.
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoI have been pleased that The Journal of Field Robotics is well represented on scihub. I have an open source off road robot I am designing and the journal is literally about robots out in fields and stuff. I am a "serious hobbyist" in that I believe my open source contributions to be at least somewhat helpful to others, but it's not the kind of thing that would justify paying for paywalled papers. I just want to glance over the material and keep track of what researchers are up to. Libgen is to me a vision of a world without copyright and intellectual property restrictions and I think it's a much better world than ours.
- tonyarkles 5y agoWow! The content in JFR is fantastic! Thank you for the pointer!
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoSo glad it was helpful!
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoMost authors of scientific papers will gladly send you a free PDF of their papers if you ask them (assuming they remember to check their e-mail and respond in the first place). The profitability of their publisher is of no concern to them.
- zekrioca 5y agoSometimes, it takes days for some authors to reply. When you do research, it is a bit like going deeper and deeper in citations. Sci-hub fix this, specially to universities in developing countries.
- Sakos 5y agoThis is a solution that doesn't scale for authors or readers. You'll just end up building another sci-hub.
- romwell 5y agoThat's the point: that the authors also support sci-hub, because it's simply doing what they would do themselves, at scale.