Clearly as stealing as downloading music from Napster was?
EDIT: Relatedly, is there some legitimate way for a non-academic to access scientific papers without spending thousands of dollars?
Same kind of thing, though still not an absolute lock that one is stealing IFF the other is. Imo.
What’s ownable is not clear. It’s part of the “social contract”, but of course that’s made up. I didn’t see or sign any contract.
(I’m talking morally obv. Legally still not clear though as it certainly depends on where you are.)
I tend towards respecting things like this though. I’ve never downloaded music illegally and only watched a pirated movie once. I’d never heard of this website for scientific papers before. It might be tempting.
Only thing I can think of is getting access through someone else’s account, which is essentially the same thing. Maybe you can enroll in a community college for less and get access yourself.
Do authors of academic papers get royalties from publishers?
Not even close imo, for this reason alone:
No.
I really tried not to wade back into this awful discussion but this is too much.
Estimates range from 40-70% of a persons weight is genetically controlled.
This whole discussion is exactly what it always is. Lol fat people should eat less burgers”
There is so much bias wrapped up in it.
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To clarify, the libraries of those academic institutions pay Elsevier et al a LOT of money for that access.
I’m at an academic institution right now and have used sci-hub before because our university doesn’t have access to that particular journal (or sometimes even that particular year of that particular journal).
And also, the scientific research in a large fraction of those papers is solely derived from taxpayer funds.
Agreed.
But I’m actually not sure if that is the university’s fault or if it’s against the terms of the publisher to do that.
Nope!
Do they actually make money from one-offs? I assumed that they got all their revenue from institutional subscriptions. It really is wild that academia allows the whole racket to persist. I know people hate pharma companies, but they do at least develop drugs in exchange for lucrative monopolies. The academic publishers just add zero value to anything.
It’s even worse. If I want to get a copy of one of my publications from the publisher I don’t even get a discount on the PDF!
I tried to get a PDF of something I published in PNAS and they told me I had to pay full price. Lol so I pirated it.
I was thinking about taking a token class at the local JC just to be able to buy NFL Sunday Tix on the cheap (and without needing to get the DirectTV satellite hardware installed).
Isn’t PNAS open-access?
You don’t need to enroll. You just need to know the name, school and birthday of someone going to college (who isn’t also planning to sign up). Credit card doesn’t have to match. You don’'t need a university email.
Most people I know would send a pdf of their paper to anyone who emailed them to ask. (And they would be flattered to be asked.)
Also(1), in many cases the pre-publication working paper is posted somewhere publicly-available like SSRN and is virtually identical to the printed version.
Also(2), some journals do pay their peer reviewers. I’m literally working on a review right now for which I’ll be paid $250 if I submit it on time.
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Well shit. It is their now. I just looked. This was maybe 8 years ago I tried. I wonder if the rules changed. Do they embargo for a time at first maybe.
It really is almost pure rent seeking.
There is a a amazing site for getting access to all journals. Pm is you want it.
Academia has been experimenting with different business models for a while now.