That’s still the easiest way. Email them don’t tweet them.
Comment on "Did you realize that we live in a reality where SciHub is illegal, and OpenAI is not?"
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 10 months agoAFAIK the individual researchers who get their work pirated and put on Sci-Hub don’t seem to particularly mind.
Why would they?
They don’t get paid when people pay for articles.
Back before everyone left twitter, the easiest way to get a paywalled study was hit up to be of the authors, they can legally give a copy to anyone, and make no money from paywalls
odium@programming.dev 10 months ago
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
It still works. The journal websites always include author contact info, just e-mail them.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 10 months ago
legally
Not necessarily. They often do not own the copyright, so then it depends on fair use exceptions. The real owners have gone after authors, which may be the reason they don’t make their articles downloadable by default.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The asking makes it legal if I recall correctly.
They can’t host a site with all their articles, but if anyone asks for a single copy, they can provide it at their discretion.
And since they don’t make any money either way, most provide it and are happy to do so.
mumblerfish@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You mean asking the publisher?
When you publish an academic paper, the journal/publisher makes you sign a transfer-of-copyright-thing. For example, that meant I could not publish my own papers as a part of my thesis. I had to ask the journals for permission to do that. Depending on how that transfer-agreement is formulated (and I imagine every publisher have a different one), an author giving away a paper they authored to someone on twitter or wherever may not be allowed. Only if you’d ask the publisher and get an ok.
emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
It depends. Some publishers ask the authors to transfer copyright. Others don’t. Even for the ones that do, the pre-print still belongs to the authors.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 10 months ago
What’s more likely?
You don’t understand the exact details of this?
Or a metric shit ton of published academics are flagrantly violating copyright law and openly encouraging people to do it?
General_Effort@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Not generally. There may be fair use exceptions allowing the sharing in some situations (depending on jurisdiction) or the publisher/owner may allow it as part of the licensing contract. But I don’t know in what jurisdiction/under what contract, it would be legal to copy something just because some random person asked.
LWD@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Even if not legally, then morally… At least, in my opinion. We’re talking about the creator giving their stuff to somebody else, and this isn’t some exceptional case like sharing state secrets or something.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well, opinions on morality… I think the whole artificial paywalling should be abolished as being against the public interest. A large faction here seems to take a very right-wing view on property, including copyrights, and will always side with owner.
How would you turn your moral intuition into a general law?
LWD@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Unfortunately, I don’t have any good answers, at least not without some major system overhauls first… It seems intuitive to me that the person or people behind a project, the actual creative forces, should have more say over making something more accessible rather than less, that corporations should have less say than individual authors, including the ones those corporations supposedly represent.
Some of that doesn’t even involve tweaking current laws. Some of it just requires enforcing them. Like the case of Disney screwing over Alan Dean Foster.
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Also, no researcher would even exist if grad students had to pay for the papers they read and cite. A lot of people is not fortunate enough to have access to these publications through their uni. Heck, even when I had it, I’d still go to sci-hub just for the sake of convenience.
Like a lot of services nowadays, they offer a mediocre service and still charge for it.