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.
Comment on "Did you realize that we live in a reality where SciHub is illegal, and OpenAI is not?"
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 8 months agoThe 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.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 8 months ago
mumblerfish@lemmy.world 8 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 8 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 8 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?
mumblerfish@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I can easily say that every academic I know and have as friends, which is all but two people, have surely “flagrantly violated copyright law”. I have no doubt. They have even asked me for help doing it. I can also tell you that none of those have ever read one of those copyright transfers. I did, once, but I do not understand law-speak and do not remember what it said. I just know that my university had that as a policy – because of lawyers – what we had to do to redistribute our articles. That is also why I had a “may not” in my comment and could only refer to anecdotes, because, surprise, I do not understand the exact details about this. But you know this, because that was in my comment.