Isn’t that what preprints are for? My limited experience was that authors have an essentially identical preprint version they submitted and happily share them with collaborators or typically on request. Conventionally people did that before sci-hub which is normative now for researchers who aren’t subject to extreme compliance requirements, but it’s still done.

Most journals and conferences would only own the published paper but I have never ever heard of them going after authors sharing preprints privately.

Similar for IEEE/ISO/ANSI standards most people use the last published draft as a working substitute for the licensed standard if they don’t have the expensive licensed access to it.

Not saying that it isn’t broken but the idea that you couldn’t share it at all isn’t typical in science.

> Isn’t that what preprints are for?

The use of preprints unfortunately really varies by field, in some (like computer science) everything has an arXiv preprint, while in some barely anyone publishes them

> sci-hub which is normative now

Scihub hasn't been updated for a long time, it is completely useless for any new papers and only exists off of name recognition. STC Nexus is where it's at.

Yeah definitely. Scientific publishing is 100% an immoral scam.

Book publishing is different though. Authors get paid. No publisher has a monopoly and there isn't really a reputation system that depends on the publisher.

You could argue that copyright terms are way too long (and I would agree), but I don't think you can justify book piracy nearly as easily as you can justify Sci-hub.

I'm not legally allowed to distribute code I wrote for a former employer, either.

How is that different? Are you saying that we both should be allowed to redistribute/resell things we wrote at the behest (and wallet) of someone else?

Was the code you wrote funded by the public?

would that matter? If it was funded by the public the institution which would own it would likely be a public one, which may come with different and more permissive licensing conditions, but the justification for OPs complaint "I can't even view my own paper", their emphasis on 'my own' wouldn't be true either.

Academics tend to do have a fairly odd and what seems like a romantic attitude to their work. They're employees, their programs and equipment are paid for by someone else whether that's the state or a business, they don't own it unless the terms they signed up to say so.

TBH none of that matters to me. If it's publicly funded, it should be 100% public domain

It's not his employer that has the rights-- it's the publisher which at no point paid for the research.

As an American tax payer I funded the poster's research. And yet if I want to read about it I have to pay a foreign private company that played no role in orchestrating or funding the research itself.

It's pretty common to transfer copyright of the final manuscript to the publisher, while retaining a non-copyright pre-submission manuscript that is widely circulated. I don't know if this has ever been tested legally. I suspect Elsevier and others are trying not to litigate this heavily because they know the press and public will hammer them on it.

My postdoc advisor would receive the copyright transfer form from the publisher, modify the text to say he retained copyright, sign that, and send it back. Without fail, the publishers accepted that document, and published the paper. Again, I don't think this is legally tested, and my advisor said it's likely they didn't even notice the rewording of the copyright transfer document.

I thought the web would change this, but in my experience, people don't weight papers published in arxiv.org nearly as high as work published in peer-reviewed journals. And the vairous attempts at post-review (faculty of science, etc) haven't been able to replace the peer-reviewed journals successfully.