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Yes, everyone uses scihub (and author websites, etc) from time to time. A related question is "who pays the per-paper fee". Well, not me, and none of my colle

Yes, everyone uses scihub (and author websites, etc) from time to time. A related question is "who pays the per-paper fee". Well, not me, and none of my colleagues. However, I've learned that the fees do get paid, but not by individuals. Rather, it's libraries that are paying, to fulfil interlibrary loan requests for papers in journals with high subscription costs and low readerships. If the number of requests times the price per request is lower than the yearly subscription cost, this can be the only way to stay within budget. Where I work, research grants let me cover journal "page charges", but they do not let me subscribe to journals, nor contribute to the library budget. This has always struck me as crazy, for the yearly cost of many journals is under the cost of publishing a single paper. Heck, we have researchers publishing in the journal of whatever, paying several tens of thousands of dollars per year ... and our library cannot afford to subscribe, so we can see our work. Yes, you read that right: in many cases, authors have to pay to publish, and then pay again to read. Some progress is being made, though. Many granting agencies now encourage researchers to publish in open-access mode. That would seem great, except that they did not increase grants to compensate for the extra cost. Money spent on those fees is money that cannot go to support graduate students. As others have noted (here, and in dozens or hundreds of similar discussion threads), things are different from field to field. I work in a field where it's just as important to read old papers as new ones. That means that the solution of authors posting to their websites is not always viable. Probably a third of the papers I read (in support of teaching) are from people who died long before the web got started.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago
>Many granting agencies now encourage researchers to publish in open-access mode. I can't see why the government wouldn't publish all works under an open license when they (ie tax-payers) paid for the research. In the UK we have a national archives that has all the infrastructure - surely it should have all experimental results and all published, and unpublished, conclusions from that work. The only reason I can see not to do that is to lock up research for private gain. That's acceptable if the researchers are prepared to forgo tax-payer funding, otherwise ... This seems like another of those situations where government make terrible contracts on behalf of citizens/subjects/tax-payers.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> authors have to pay to publish, and then pay again to read That makes me sick. I'm sorry that you had to suffer this indignity.
PartiallyTyped 5y ago
There is also r/scholar where I may or may not have provided articles to other people.
- raattgift 5y ago
  Similarly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICanHazPDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICanHazPDF
krull10 5y ago
Governments shouldn’t be paying significant amounts of tax payer money in page fees or open access fees. There should be a small cap on what will be paid, a requirement work is open access and deposited in public databases, and that’s it. It’s outrageous that tax payers are spending $5000 so someone can publish in a Nature type journal, and a waste compared to the additional postdoc and researcher salaries all these page charges could instead go to pay for. Unfortunately, the incentives in academia are such that as long as grants will provide such funds researchers will publish in these journals, so I think this can really only be fixed by funding bodies reducing the money they provide for publications. At the end of the day, I don’t think any journal should be getting more than ~$200-$300 for publishing an article. They simply don’t add much value at this point beyond the prestige of their name.
gbrown 5y ago
> but they do not let me subscribe to journals, nor contribute to the library budget. Not defending the publishing system, but that’s what indirects are for.
stathibus 5y ago
Yeah, progress is being made. It's an open secret that traditional journal publishers add no value in the 21st century. Zero, zilch. Their time is up, and they know it... In some fields more than others so far, but it will come for the rest eventually. As far as I'm concerned a paper hasn't been stolen unless it's been accessed without the authors' permission.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago

>Many granting agencies now encourage researchers to publish in open-access mode. I can't see why the government wouldn't publish all works under an open license when they (ie tax-payers) paid for the research. In the UK we have a national archives that has all the infrastructure - surely it should have all experimental results and all published, and unpublished, conclusions from that work. The only reason I can see not to do that is to lock up research for private gain. That's acceptable if the researchers are prepared to forgo tax-payer funding, otherwise ... This seems like another of those situations where government make terrible contracts on behalf of citizens/subjects/tax-payers.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> authors have to pay to publish, and then pay again to read That makes me sick. I'm sorry that you had to suffer this indignity.

PartiallyTyped 5y ago

There is also r/scholar where I may or may not have provided articles to other people.

raattgift 5y ago
Similarly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICanHazPDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICanHazPDF

krull10 5y ago

Governments shouldn’t be paying significant amounts of tax payer money in page fees or open access fees. There should be a small cap on what will be paid, a requirement work is open access and deposited in public databases, and that’s it. It’s outrageous that tax payers are spending $5000 so someone can publish in a Nature type journal, and a waste compared to the additional postdoc and researcher salaries all these page charges could instead go to pay for. Unfortunately, the incentives in academia are such that as long as grants will provide such funds researchers will publish in these journals, so I think this can really only be fixed by funding bodies reducing the money they provide for publications. At the end of the day, I don’t think any journal should be getting more than ~$200-$300 for publishing an article. They simply don’t add much value at this point beyond the prestige of their name.

gbrown 5y ago

> but they do not let me subscribe to journals, nor contribute to the library budget. Not defending the publishing system, but that’s what indirects are for.

stathibus 5y ago

Yeah, progress is being made. It's an open secret that traditional journal publishers add no value in the 21st century. Zero, zilch. Their time is up, and they know it... In some fields more than others so far, but it will come for the rest eventually. As far as I'm concerned a paper hasn't been stolen unless it's been accessed without the authors' permission.