- more and more research institutes have a public repository of articles.
- plenty of authors put their own (preprints of) papers on their personal website, a preprint server like arxiv, or researchgate.
- lastly, you can mail an author and request a preprint. Not all will reply, but plenty will be happy that someone noticed their work and send a copy.
For some reason, they're also slow to respond to emails.
For any papers published before 1965, even with maximal renewals available at the time of publication, the works would now be in the public domain under copyright law at the time of publication. Otherwise, many works published prior to 1976 which were either only renewed once or never registered would similarly have lapsed to public domain, or always been so.
That's a huge effectively-lost trove of knowledge.
For a single paper, googling for the pdf, failing that, searching for author page / institutional repo doesn't take much effort. A few minutes, I'd guess.
That still becomes prohibitive for >10 papers sought. Then you need institutional access, something like Sci-Hub, or a lot of patience.
Mailing works as a last resort option.
Honestly, part of the reason i jump through such hoops is to justify not including a paper. I have institutional access and all these options. If none of that suffices, I feel justified in considering the alleged article as not part of the scientific record.
That's a fraction of the citations on most interesting papers. I'm not a practicing scientist (now or ever) so my access patterns are different but every time I explore a topic in academic journals that process becomes prohibitively expensive almost immediately. Even when I had institutional access it was a pain in the ass - without SciHub every doi is a game of subscription roulette.
Asking by email.. too many publications at the moment.
But none of the stuff should be behind paywalls in the first place if it was funded by the government of any nation. Good luck fixing that.
> In 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet, and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT. Federal prosecutors, led by Carmen Ortiz, later charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release. Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, where he committed suicide. In 2013, Swartz was inducted posthumously into the Internet Hall of Fame.
It is impossible to talk about this without getting emotional, especially on a site like Hacker News, so I won't.
I can just imagine how negatively this effects scientists and researchers in the developing world, that lack so much content because these miscreants have absconded with so much from us. They did not create this content, they are worse than accursed gatekeepers, serving only to compile the work of others, then extract blood. Infernal blood sucking parasites are what these companies are.
By nature of my well heeled employer I have access to almost everything. However, I think it is unconscionable now, how much of it is paywalled, rent-extracted, and hidden from view. That so much of the world is missing out on this information because some extortionists want $ for something they had minimal, if any, involvement in creating.