Tip of the Day!
Here is a reminder to everyone [rightly] pissed at the incredibly high cost of peer-reviewed journal articles behind paywalls:
If you send an email to the lead/corresponding author (whose contact is almost always provided in the article, or easily found with google) and ask for a copy of the article, the author will almost universally be delighted to send a copy [legally] to you, free.
We authors LOVE it when someone asks for a copy of our articles!!!
One more tip. Authors can post their papers on their personal websites.
I do, for almost all my peer-reviewed papers. Go check them out at www.gleick.com
Another pro-tip : a lot of folks post their papers to academia.edu. Always check there: https://www.academia.edu/ . Then reach out. Otherwise the email traffic gets yikes.
I still do not like the Elseviers of the academic publishing world. I understand that maintaining journals isn't free. But the funding model where editors work for free and contributors either pay thousands of $$ for open access (or waive the rights and let the publisher charge) feels yuck. We can do better.
@petergleick one of the greatest aspects of #researchgate is how simple this process becomes.
And agree - authors are happy to give you the fruit of their labors.
You speak out of experience ?
(with the comic sans all caps😂)
I've never tried that. Thank you
There are more than a dozen ways to get access to nominally paywalled scholarly articles:
https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/12/so-your-institute-went-cold-turkey-on-publisher-x-what-now/
This has been the case for over a decade now. Paywalls have effectively ceased to exist around 2012 or so. We've essentially enjoyed full #openaccess ever since:
https://bjoern.brembs.net/2017/09/with-the-access-issue-temporarily-solved-what-now/
With the start of the new year 2017, about 60 universities and other research institutions in Germany are set to lose subscription access to one of the main STEM publishers, Elsevier. The reason being negotiations of the DEAL consortium (600 […] <a class="more-link" href="https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/12/so-your-institute-went-cold-turkey-on-publisher-x-what-now/">↓ Read the rest of this entry...</a>
This is one of many reasons why now, e.g., the science ministers of the EU have decided it's time to replace parasitic publishers with a scholarly infrastructure:
To great enthusiasm from scholarly organizations:
https://www.coalition-s.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/JointResponse2CouncilScholCommConclusions.pdf
or
and funders who are now planning how to get this project off the ground:
Of course, all of this is based on ideas coming out of the scholarly community:
So automate that and build a site of "they sent me this" articles?
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