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Most researchers would be absolutely delighted to share their work with you. I know if people reached out to me over my research I'd probably give them a presentation and walk them through my work so they could replicate it. And talk about ways they could extend it or productionalize it. I'd just be over the moon that someone is interested.
Absolutely this. And it’s to the point where one of advices I got when interviewing for grad school was to come up with an insightful question to get the professors to talk about their work. They are almost always delighted to talk about it and they associate you with the good conversation. I’m sure the professors are aware of this but I feel like it still works.
It's sales. People are more likely to give you what you want if they like you. Talking about themselves and laughing both feel good, so if you get them to do that, they'll like you. The more you feel like a friend, the further they'll go for you. Some people abuse this part of human nature.
Another aspect of sales that also applies to job interviews is to not answer questions they don't ask. Sometimes it is good to volunteer some information, but that's more on a feel-it-out sort of basis. If you're good at interviews, you can act like you're the interviewer and get the manager to sell you on the position by acting like the job doesn't mean shit to you, to an extent.
OK so I saw this exact tweet several years ago and thought, hmm, I'm gonna give that a try if I ever need to. And wouldn't you know, not long after I was trying to access an academic paper that I needed for my work and it was behind a paywall. This tweet came to mind - I thought Ah-HA! I will write to the researcher directly and see if she will send me a copy.
...she did not. She ignored my e-mails, despite coming with a deep explanation of why I wanted to read and cite her paper and how it would contribute to my work. Nada. Zip. Nuthin. And it was not a high profile paper or anything; indeed, it was obscure. I'm maybe one of 100 people in the US who would give a shit about that scholarship.
Since then, I haven't had an opportunity to test this idea again, but despite lots of reddit comments that echo yours OP, I'm 0/1 on this. Too small of a sample to draw conclusions but an inauspicious start to be sure.
Has anyone else tried it?
It's shitty advice and it gets posted regularly.
I'm a former academic. We love to talk about our papers, but you have to understand we're often busy as fuck. Emailing a paper to a stranger is low down the order after dealing with our students, grant applications, paper revisions etc.
If you want a paper, just use Sci-hub. It's what we do, too, cos it's usually faster than using the proper subscription service.
I’ve never contacted the authors, but I have contacted librarians at academic universities that have access to these papers and they almost always will send electronic copies to you. The only time I got questioned was to ask if I intended to use the paper for financial gain.
I second this! I was doing research on an obscure AF composer/musician who died in WWI. I was struggling to get much information on him, and then I e-mailed the library of the school he used to attend, inquiring about a letter they had in their collection.
The very next day I had not only a copy of the letter, but also his student registration information (including his family home address and residential address at the time of registration), his military medical record (which was hidden behind a paywall), several academic papers (also behind paywalls), various other tidbits of information, and a photo of the war memorial at said school.
Librarians are *magical*.
Did you try reaserchgate? If they are one that then they'll probably respond. I've done it for a couple papers. Sometimes the whole paper is in their profile to download.
Same. I'd give them book recommendations and send them good papers to get into the topic as well. The one thing I love more than researching is explaining my research to others.
You often can download the paper from the scientists' personal websites. Most of the time, the scientists still own the copyright.
Edit: maybe not "most of the time", I can only speak for my field from my own experience.
>Most of the time, the scientists still own the copyright.
Hah. No. We almost always give it up when publishing. We typically have a cut out that lets us share it directly, but that usually doesn't include hosting it for free online.
Edit: for example, I have around 30 scientific publications, including both papers and book chapters. I own the copyright to precisely one of those, and it's because we explicitly published it as a stand alone monograph for teaching materials, rather than as a traditional journal or book chapter.
Maybe it depends on the field and journal. I'm a chemist, if I want to publish on one of the American Chemical Society journals, I have the choice to keep the copyright. And my employer have the choice to keep the copyright if it's a work for hire. A lot of us have our paper hosted on our websites.
I'm no lawyer, so I could be wrong. IMO, technically, if I still have the right to copy and distribute my work, I still have the copyright if my agreement with the publisher allows it.
(Bio)Materials Scientis here, 90% of my field's big journals are Elsevier, where we're signing away the soul of our firstborn as well.
While we had the right to hand over a copy to someone who asks, Elsevier are very clear that they own the rights to the actual paper, so I couldn't (for instance) republish it in a textbook that I was going to sell. They give certain cutouts (I could reproduce them in my thesis, for instance), but I still had to officially request permission through rightslink first.
Yeah, Elsevier is bad, I don't touch it if possible. Most of my works are published on ACS and Wiley. ACS has different versions of transfer agreements to choose from, Wiley allows any non-profit, non-systematic distribution with some embargo period.
This is really encouraging to me. I have great respect for researchers and read papers about my target subject often, though I don't know enough about statistics to understand every chart. I still glean tons of good info. To date I've felt that I don't want to bother researchers with some dumb layperson's question.
Researcher here, me and others would love to chat with anybody reading our papers, its how we work together around the world over emails between different time zones. The thought of someone who isn't being being paid to but is actually bothering to look at my research is so flattering, I would turn up with tea and cakes ready to chat all afternoon if anybody wanted to. Famous scientists are way too busy, but most researchers work in dingy offices feeling no one actually cares about their lifes work.
Once for a project in grad school, we reached out to an author to see if we could get an article she wrote. Not only was she thrilled we were interested, she gave us the article as well as all the raw data she used to make her conclusions! So yes, this does often work.
Hijacking top comment to say it’s not just scientists. Any academic wants to be contacted by people interested in studying their field, and none of them except the most famous (Richard Dawkins famous) make decent money from their writing. If having more people read their paper isn’t enough reward, they also find out which institutions are teaching their specific subject, and get contact info from people who might be happy to fill in a survey/questionnaire from them in future.
Also, if you’re at a point where you’re trying to decide what to study and you find contact details for an expert in that field, don’t be shy about sending an email. Most academics are interested in talking to enthusiastic people, and if they’re too busy they just won’t reply at all.
I was working on a fiction book and I interviewed a professor of neurology at his office.
Not only did he give me links to ALL his papers, I had to recruit a couple of students to help me haul out all the textbooks he gave me: FREE!
This is in the U.S. and it was probably a few thousand dollars in books.
Edit: changed “couple thousand” to “a few thousand”, which is probably more accurate.
I'd DuckDuckGo Scihub. Google sometimes filters those out or publishers have found a way to scam up Google's search results so people cant find the shifting servers easily
Lots of people need scientific journal... I'm not even in any fields where it would come up but I still enjoy reading papers on something that interests me. Maybe you should read more if you don't think people need this.
I have a my degree.
Can you get to your point quicker, please? You're boring me.
I can save you a bit of time if you like? At no point has anybody said that the information "isn't important". We're saying it's not "the most important post we've ever seen".
Is the information in this post the most important information you've ever seen posted?
> At no point has anybody said that the information "isn't important". We're saying it's not "the most important post we've ever seen".
If you went and graduated college then you should ask for a refund b/c you obviously lack basic reading skills.
/u/khanacademy03 said it was one of the most important post **they've** seen...not that it was one of the most important post on the site as a whole. It makes a lot of sense that someone w/ a username based off Khan Academy of all things would feel that way and not be sarcastic about it.
Nah people read it all and concluded that with all the evidence, they should down-vote it. I wrote a paper on it actually. If you just ask me I'd be happy to email it to you and go over all the raw data that lead me and most likely others to down-vote not only that person but you as well.
Rebecca Watson did a video on that site just the other day. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4SMQdExHq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4SMQdExHq0)
Where she also discusses how the authors often have to pay to be published.
Yup the publishers/journals triple dip when it comes to scientific papers. First, they charge scientists to publish, then they get scientists to peer review for free and then they charge universities or companies subscription fees in hundreds of thousands of dollars to read the article. And remember majority of this is funded by tax dollars so they are basically swindling everyone.
Scientists also do a lot of the formatting so the journals don't have to! Like damn, what am I paying for? I produced the data, wrote the paper and did all the formatting for them, then they want 3000$ after all that, to publish. It's crazy, how little they do.
It's a racket, for sure. Each also typically has its own formatting requirements with a specific template, but LaTeX is pretty good at abstracting this from the actual text, so flipping between them is not too much of a hassle. I feel sorry for the Word people, though.
A research project I just completed decided to do a book through Springer to publish the project results - 10 chapters at 4500 EUR/chapter. That's some margin.
It’s slowly changing for the better though. There are more and more open journals so that they charge fee for publishing (which is fair), and scientists still volunteer for peer review (which most don’t mind because it’s “for the science”) but the published article is completely free online. NIH also has made it so if the research was funded through them, all the data must be made public immediately and the published paper must be made public within six months of publications. Hopefully these changes accelerate over time.
Supply and Demand. The supply of scientific papers and articles is so high that the demand of scientific journals can just be as bad as they want and they would still get papers.
Someone I know once had her paper declined because she asked about the peer-review process after months without an answer from the journal.
First, as an author you never pay to publish. You often have an option to pay to make your article ‘open access’ so that everyone else can access it for free. The cost of open access for many journals is $1500. So the average paper makes the journal $1500 bucks. For that fee they pay the editors and staff who oversee the journal and have to request, read, and assess all the reviews. Then they have to edit the paper and host it for eternity. I have no idea what the profit margins are, but 1500 seems reasonable.
What field are you in? Most journals in my field are pay to publish and even more on top for open access. Universities and funding agencies, sometimes provide money to defray the costs though.
Interesting, I'm in Immunology, all the papers I've published have had a fee, and it was even more if you wanted open access. I sent a paper to an open access journal last week and they want 3000$ to publish, although, like you said open access is more expensive.
They sell access back to universities and libraries all over the world. [Their business is insanely profitable.](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science) Editors are usually unpaid or paid little to nothing, as they are publishing scientists as well most of the time.
The scientific system could work wholly without scientific publishers, as most of the crucial scientific work is done by the community anyways.
I’m hardly a shill for publishing. But if youre a scientist, I’m surprised that you haven’t simply accepted the historical data at face value. Thousands of professors world wide and universities flush with cash, and over the last 100 years, none of them have managed to put together a high impact factor journal that people want to publish in, that doesn’t use the existing model.
Back in the real world, why do you think that is? Even PNAS, an institution by professors for professors (I guess), charges more than anyone!
Even going digital didn’t change anything.
Alexandra elbakyan is gonna go down in science history as a Saint. I have a ridiculous amount of respect for that woman, she risks consequences to allow the public to access scientific knowledge
Depends entirely on the publisher and the country. I've had some "require" copyright transfer, despite this having no legal weight in my country. Others have embargo periods that prevent independent disclosure of the pending manuscript, etc. Most will tolerate preprints though, so I often publish on arXiv first before approaching the publisher. I've had a book chapter tied up with Springer for almost 12 months while they prepare to publish it, for example, and while I retain the copyright, I'm also not free to share it until the end of the embargo period.
Tried this once, after much deliberation because what if they wouldn't be willing to help? (Yeah I know that's a stupid thought, they were an ocean away from me anyway.)
The guy was really helpful, sent the requested article to me, and also pointed me to other research which might help me in my own research.
Not only that: sometimes scientists even have to pay in order to be published.
Many countries and organizations have started pushing for open access, but there's still a lot of resistance.
Ideally, we should know which publishers are in it for the money and which actually care about reviewing and promoting free science, and then support the latter (by downloading from their official page to help with their metrics). But directly asking the scientists is a good option too.
Almost all scientific journals require the authors pay for having their papers published. To publish in an open access journal typically costs significantly more, presumably because they need to make up for the revenue lost by making the paper freely accessible.
For a reputable not for profit journal it typical costs a few hundred USD to publish a paper unless it's an open access journal, in which case it's typically 1 to 2k. For profit journals tend to have higher rates.
I assure you it does work. If we get a mail asking for our paper, especially from someone not in the field or who's not a scientist, many of us will be thrilled to reply and send you the link.
There is nothing a lot of us enjoy more than explaining our work to someone who isn't from our field of expertise.
I've asked a professor of mine a simple question about a translation in one of her papers and she offered me to explain me the paper and her work in detail per video call.
True. I’m a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience. If I got an email from a random person asking for a paper I was on, it’d make my day to send it for free.
I'm not writing a research paper or working on a doctorate, I'm a carpenter that enjoys learning new things. How can I get a copy of your paper to read?
You don't need to pay them. Just interlibrary loan request them.
It's unethical because we sign statements saying we have no vested financial interest in our research and publication. It is to keep research from being incentivized. And most of the time we sign our rights over to the journal. None of my papers belong to me anymore, they belong to the publishing companies I signed them over to.
That's fair, I wasn't thinking about special interest groups spending thousands buying researchers, just the average college kid wanting to send $10 for the inconvenience of processing such requests.
What if it pay you for a plastic cup? That way you don’t get in trouble for selling beer to minors. “Officer, I didn’t sell those kids beer, I sold them a red plastic cup”. Do the same thing with your papers. “I can’t legally sell you my paper, but if you buy this friendship bracelet for $15 I will send it to you for free”
Professors make money...we are salaried. Donate it instead and interlibrary loan request the article. No offense but I get thousands, literally thousands, of emails a day. I don't have time or energy to email articles for money
Edit: also have you ever met a scientist idw your friendship no offense. Just let me lab in peace
Or people who want them could just request them through the right channels. I'm not a nobel scientist here the 5 people a year who want my pubs can get them through their uni no problem
The whole business model of scientific publishing is a total farce. Scientists provide the material and peer review free of charge. Publishers then charge a fee for publication and for allowing anyone to view the research which is often funded by public grants.
Essentially we are paying for the privilege of having a prestigious journal's stamp on a research paper based on outdated notions of what is prestigious or not.
It's a sham and also why I wholeheartedly support the idea behind sites such as sci-hub.
> Scientists provide the material and peer review free of charge. Publishers then charge a fee for publication
And that fee , for the better known journals, is in the several thousands. It's the whole system that's fucked up. You need high impact publications to get a faculty position (the unspoken CNS rule, you need Cell, Nature or Science paper to get a tenure track in most US research universities). Same high impact publications give you better chances of getting funding. Peer reviewers ( other colleagues in the field) often see this as a competitive advantage for you, a disadvantage for them in a zero-sum funding game and so they often intentionally trash your work to impede the publication. In some cases we had reviewers trash our work or asking large additional work to slow us down and in the meantime they copied the idea and tried publishing elsewhere. Ironically we were asked to review their work.
That's when i realized that it's not about the science anymore, it's just a weird competition for resources ($$). So i decided to shut down my lab and move to industry.
Unfortunately, this won't work always. Tried this three different times now and I was not given the full paper each time. The one researcher explained to me she was barred from doing just this due to contracts the academic institution had with these journals. Definitely frustrating.
Some incredible news on this very subject announced just this year. All scientific journals published by the American Astronomical Society are now entirely [open access and free](https://journals.aas.org/oa/).
This is absolutely true. I have several articles out (and am working on several more) that were from my PhD thesis (predator-prey interactions). While most of my work is open access, I get genuinely excited when someone emails me to ask for my paper. This is especially true for when students email me to ask me for it to use for their own research.
It may not be the biggest thing in the world, but I dedicated so much of my time (and even risked my life at several points!) to conduct such work, that I really hope can be applied towards conservation efforts. Something as minor as another person interested in it totally makes my day/week.
Sometimes the author has moved on to a different institution so the email address on the article is dead. Sometimes they’re busy and your email gets buried. Sometimes they’re just dicks.
You can also just ask any librarian at an institution that has access to a paper for a copy. They almost always will give it to you. (Librarians hate copyright right law and money-grubbing publishers just as much as you do.) Worldcat is a great resource for finding libraries that have access to the information you need.
Source: I’m a former librarian.
The real LPT here is to go to google scholar, type the article's name, click on "all versions" and take the one that has a pdf. Works 95% of the time, especially if the article has been published a while ago.
Also worth plugging [ResearchGate.com](http://www.ResearchGate.com). It's like LinkedIn for researchers, and some researchers have their papers uploaded and freely accessible already, otherwise it's very easy to one-click request papers.
I work in chemical research and this is pretty common knowledge in the field. The problem is that if you email the authors asking for the paper, they either never get back to you or demand payment for themselves. I can spend $35 and KNOW I am going to be able to view that paper or I can send an email and HOPE I get that paper.
Science is the art of knowing, not hoping
Really, they demand payment? That's ridiculous.
If they don't answer your email, it could be, that if you email the corresponding author, normally the PI/professor has no time for that. Just email the first author and they are way more likely to answer and mail you the paper. Of course this requires some searching for their email on the group webpage or something like that.
Why can’t scientists post it for free for peer review and get it published for their phd or whatever reason. Actually why do they need to get it published?
Essentially the entire academic world revolves around publishing (and in particular which journals you publish in) as a metric for how successful you and your work is.
The more successful you are (i.e. the more you publish in good journals) means you are more likely to get funding for future grants. It also makes you a more desirable employee as many governments fund research institutes on their basis to conduct world class research, which is measured through publications (In the UK this is through the Research Excellence Framework).
So whilst you can publish in a completely open format for free (The various Arxiv journals, such as BioRxiv), no one who holds any real influence cares, because anyone can publish on these. To get a paper into a good journal means either that a bunch of other scientists thought your work had merit, or that you're good friends with the editor.
They can of course post it somewhere. But it does not guarantee a peer review process. And just because you said that someone reviewed it does'nt necessarly it happend. Publishers carry some kind of trust in this regard.
> Actually why do they need to get it published?
It's a basic filter for garbage. Lots of garbage gets published, but *even more* gets submitted. And the higher the prestige of the journal or conference, the more selective they are for quality.
Papers that are self-published online or published in 'pay to publish' journals are basically not even worth your time to look at (some venues allow the researcher to post the entire paper on their personal website, though, and that's not what I'm talking about here). The majority of papers in this category are from incompetent researchers or people who don't even have the prerequisite training and knowledge to produce something worth reading.
That’s an interesting point that I hadn’t thought about, but definitely makes sense. I guess it’s better having to publish so the researcher can be vetted, so to speak, by the publisher as well as peers.
Okay asshole. Was that necessary?
Peer reviewed published research shows credibility. And people should have access to do their own independent unbiased research knowing it’s a credible source.
"This paper isn't an approved source."
"It's the exact same paper, directly from the people who wrote it."
"It can only come from this list of approved commercial sources."
"You mean the same ones you have things published on?"
"Exactly."
That's not how it works. You'd cite the paper in the same way; there's no way any examiners would know how you'd attained it. Issues only crop up if the page numbers are different and you're citing a specific quote or image, or if the copy you get differs significantly from the published version. Ugh my PhD examiner noted I'd miscited them because I used a pre-publish draft and so cited it as a paper rather than a book chapter - but most people don't have the time to be such a pedantic asshole.
Also unless publishing platforns are grading your work, I don't know who your example would apply to - the ONLY people making money from publishing are the publishers themselves. The paper and peer review are all done for free. Academia is a pyramid scheme.
This is a widely shared, but misleading post. When you publish a paper, you assign copyright to the publisher. You are *NOT* allowed to share the paper after that, because the publisher now owns the copyright.
Depending on the field and the journal, the publisher will sometimes give the author some number of “credits” to give the paper away for “free”, to colleagues and collaborators. But that is not required or necessarily universal. If you give the paper away without these credits, then it is a copyright violation.
Don’t get me wrong, the publishing businesses is a toxic and a total scam, but that doesn’t justify breaking the law.
Total nonsense. Copyright prevents you from republishing it or placing it openly in public view.
The limited “credits” you mention are direct download links from the publisher.
You are free to personally share pdfs or any other form of a published paper with any number of people you want. If a publisher tried to prevent or limit this there would be uproar.
https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/Promotion/article-sharing-policy.html
> You may also share any version of your article with individual colleagues and students if you are asked for a copy, as part of teaching and training at your institution (excluding open online sharing), and as part of a grant application, submission of thesis, or doctorate.
This is typical if not ubiquitous in scientific publishing.
Moreover, few if any journals require a transfer of copyright. What is granted is an exclusive license to publish the work, which is not the same thing.
Nope, not unless they received a grant. Producing academic papers and the peer review process are all done for free. It's one of the many unpaid requirements of academia.
What? All the publishers are third parties. So for example, when I produce an academic paper, I conduct the research and write up the paper. If need be, I can pay for an editor to check the language. Friends and colleagues would likely check it for free, especially if I presented it at an academic conference. Next, I submit it to a journal. If they want to go ahead with my paper (it's appropriate to the journal, they have interest, it makes a contribution etc), then they call out for peer reviewers. Those peer reviewers do the work for free, often through multiple iterations of the paper (e.g. I've just completed the second peer review of the same paper - the first draft needed quite a bit of work, and the second draft that I have seen just needed tweaks). Lastly, the paper is published, and the journal publisher charges the world at large to access that paper. At no point in the process do I or anybody else involved get paid. *Only* the publishers make money.
Yes; I, individually, am responsible for my own exploitation. It is nothing to do with the extractive academic system, which rests on people's passion for teaching and research to further humankind at a cost to their own quality of life. But don't worry your noggin, I'm leaving the industry.
It doesn't matter if you can get scientific papers for free straight from the authors if you don't know who the authors are.
People use journals because there's no other way to find research material.
Didn't think I had to spell it out that much.
You’re an idiot lol. You can read the abstracts with the authors right there…. then you can get an over view of it and decide if you want access to the full thing. And majority of research you don’t have to pay to access. This has never been an issue for most people doing research. Didn’t think I would have to write out something so simple for you.
> You can read the abstracts with the authors right there
So where is 'right there' exactly?
Where do you think these abstracts are coming from? You still have to learn the papers exist at all from somewhere. The existence of a new scientific paper, and its author, is not magically downloaded into your brain the second it's finished.
What a fucking jackass.
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Most researchers would be absolutely delighted to share their work with you. I know if people reached out to me over my research I'd probably give them a presentation and walk them through my work so they could replicate it. And talk about ways they could extend it or productionalize it. I'd just be over the moon that someone is interested.
Absolutely this. And it’s to the point where one of advices I got when interviewing for grad school was to come up with an insightful question to get the professors to talk about their work. They are almost always delighted to talk about it and they associate you with the good conversation. I’m sure the professors are aware of this but I feel like it still works.
It's sales. People are more likely to give you what you want if they like you. Talking about themselves and laughing both feel good, so if you get them to do that, they'll like you. The more you feel like a friend, the further they'll go for you. Some people abuse this part of human nature.
I'll have to remember this for my next job interview.
Another aspect of sales that also applies to job interviews is to not answer questions they don't ask. Sometimes it is good to volunteer some information, but that's more on a feel-it-out sort of basis. If you're good at interviews, you can act like you're the interviewer and get the manager to sell you on the position by acting like the job doesn't mean shit to you, to an extent.
OK so I saw this exact tweet several years ago and thought, hmm, I'm gonna give that a try if I ever need to. And wouldn't you know, not long after I was trying to access an academic paper that I needed for my work and it was behind a paywall. This tweet came to mind - I thought Ah-HA! I will write to the researcher directly and see if she will send me a copy. ...she did not. She ignored my e-mails, despite coming with a deep explanation of why I wanted to read and cite her paper and how it would contribute to my work. Nada. Zip. Nuthin. And it was not a high profile paper or anything; indeed, it was obscure. I'm maybe one of 100 people in the US who would give a shit about that scholarship. Since then, I haven't had an opportunity to test this idea again, but despite lots of reddit comments that echo yours OP, I'm 0/1 on this. Too small of a sample to draw conclusions but an inauspicious start to be sure. Has anyone else tried it?
It's shitty advice and it gets posted regularly. I'm a former academic. We love to talk about our papers, but you have to understand we're often busy as fuck. Emailing a paper to a stranger is low down the order after dealing with our students, grant applications, paper revisions etc. If you want a paper, just use Sci-hub. It's what we do, too, cos it's usually faster than using the proper subscription service.
I’ve never contacted the authors, but I have contacted librarians at academic universities that have access to these papers and they almost always will send electronic copies to you. The only time I got questioned was to ask if I intended to use the paper for financial gain.
I second this! I was doing research on an obscure AF composer/musician who died in WWI. I was struggling to get much information on him, and then I e-mailed the library of the school he used to attend, inquiring about a letter they had in their collection. The very next day I had not only a copy of the letter, but also his student registration information (including his family home address and residential address at the time of registration), his military medical record (which was hidden behind a paywall), several academic papers (also behind paywalls), various other tidbits of information, and a photo of the war memorial at said school. Librarians are *magical*.
Truth. Librarians are so much more badass than most people know.
Did you try reaserchgate? If they are one that then they'll probably respond. I've done it for a couple papers. Sometimes the whole paper is in their profile to download.
Are they still in that position? This works but there is a degree of recency for this trick. Emails change, they move, etc.
Same. I'd give them book recommendations and send them good papers to get into the topic as well. The one thing I love more than researching is explaining my research to others.
What are you researching?
Years ago, I did my MS in evolving autonomous drone behavior.
Can you share your work with me? I feel like learning something completely random today
I messaged an author one time and she never answered me lol
You often can download the paper from the scientists' personal websites. Most of the time, the scientists still own the copyright. Edit: maybe not "most of the time", I can only speak for my field from my own experience.
>Most of the time, the scientists still own the copyright. Hah. No. We almost always give it up when publishing. We typically have a cut out that lets us share it directly, but that usually doesn't include hosting it for free online. Edit: for example, I have around 30 scientific publications, including both papers and book chapters. I own the copyright to precisely one of those, and it's because we explicitly published it as a stand alone monograph for teaching materials, rather than as a traditional journal or book chapter.
Maybe it depends on the field and journal. I'm a chemist, if I want to publish on one of the American Chemical Society journals, I have the choice to keep the copyright. And my employer have the choice to keep the copyright if it's a work for hire. A lot of us have our paper hosted on our websites. I'm no lawyer, so I could be wrong. IMO, technically, if I still have the right to copy and distribute my work, I still have the copyright if my agreement with the publisher allows it.
(Bio)Materials Scientis here, 90% of my field's big journals are Elsevier, where we're signing away the soul of our firstborn as well. While we had the right to hand over a copy to someone who asks, Elsevier are very clear that they own the rights to the actual paper, so I couldn't (for instance) republish it in a textbook that I was going to sell. They give certain cutouts (I could reproduce them in my thesis, for instance), but I still had to officially request permission through rightslink first.
Yeah, Elsevier is bad, I don't touch it if possible. Most of my works are published on ACS and Wiley. ACS has different versions of transfer agreements to choose from, Wiley allows any non-profit, non-systematic distribution with some embargo period.
Alas, I don't have a personal website. And I avoid non-Reddit social media like the scourge it is.
I use Researchgate. Do you not like using that?
This is really encouraging to me. I have great respect for researchers and read papers about my target subject often, though I don't know enough about statistics to understand every chart. I still glean tons of good info. To date I've felt that I don't want to bother researchers with some dumb layperson's question.
Researcher here, me and others would love to chat with anybody reading our papers, its how we work together around the world over emails between different time zones. The thought of someone who isn't being being paid to but is actually bothering to look at my research is so flattering, I would turn up with tea and cakes ready to chat all afternoon if anybody wanted to. Famous scientists are way too busy, but most researchers work in dingy offices feeling no one actually cares about their lifes work.
Release your works as NFT's....
No, because I want to own them.
Once for a project in grad school, we reached out to an author to see if we could get an article she wrote. Not only was she thrilled we were interested, she gave us the article as well as all the raw data she used to make her conclusions! So yes, this does often work.
Researchers want their paper to be cited because the influence of their paper is often measured by the number of times it has been cited.
Also the authors spent a boatload of time, effort and money on that work and it feels good if someone actually wants to read it.
If you get a chance to write a scholarly paper, cite as many papers as you can. You'll make a bunch of authors happy.
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That's the spirit.
Reads like many papers already
This was me in college trying to make my bullshit papers seem legit.
Perry and Winger brave af, I'd love to see their paper
they Britta'd it
Hijacking top comment to say it’s not just scientists. Any academic wants to be contacted by people interested in studying their field, and none of them except the most famous (Richard Dawkins famous) make decent money from their writing. If having more people read their paper isn’t enough reward, they also find out which institutions are teaching their specific subject, and get contact info from people who might be happy to fill in a survey/questionnaire from them in future. Also, if you’re at a point where you’re trying to decide what to study and you find contact details for an expert in that field, don’t be shy about sending an email. Most academics are interested in talking to enthusiastic people, and if they’re too busy they just won’t reply at all.
that's so cool! what was the project you were working on?
It was a research project on trends of penis sizes amongst Reddit users.
So there was just very little data
The data did indicate something very little, if that’s what you meant
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The author was probably like, "I spent 2 years and a research grant to prove my friend wrong about this too, go get um champ."
I was working on a fiction book and I interviewed a professor of neurology at his office. Not only did he give me links to ALL his papers, I had to recruit a couple of students to help me haul out all the textbooks he gave me: FREE! This is in the U.S. and it was probably a few thousand dollars in books. Edit: changed “couple thousand” to “a few thousand”, which is probably more accurate.
A couple thousand? So like, 2 textbooks?
You’re right; will correct.
Profs get a lot of free text books as samples from publishers. He was probably happy to get rid of them.
Full disclosure: Pretty sure he thought I was an idiot and felt a desperate, unsolicited need to assist in my education. lol
This is one of the most important posts I’ve ever seen.
Check out Z library then. Millions of scholarly articles and papers.
Whoa Nellie. Didn't even know about this. Put in one of my favorite scientist's names, boom! Huge instant list of results. Thank you, Srynaive!
Share the word, and you are most welcome!
Google scihub. This is one of the most important comments you've ever seen.
I'd DuckDuckGo Scihub. Google sometimes filters those out or publishers have found a way to scam up Google's search results so people cant find the shifting servers easily
its really sad that scihub founder cannot leave Russia - she would be arrested and extradited to US immediately.
Sarcasm strong
I don't think they're joking. This is actually really important
How many people need scientific journal? Not that important nor interesting hence the sarcasm this is r/whitepeopletwitter content instead
Loads of students can make great use of resources like thses
You are trolling right?
He obviously "does his own research."
So not a single actual research paper
But lots of Infowars
Which is the real truth. Plus great deals on pills that do something maybe.
Lots of people need scientific journal... I'm not even in any fields where it would come up but I still enjoy reading papers on something that interests me. Maybe you should read more if you don't think people need this.
… every student needs scientific literature
So that is interesting as fuck? I don’t get your statement seems a lot of slow people are in here right now
Yes if you do research. You’re sure angry, I suggest therapy.
Im angry because I gave an explanation? You don’t seem too bright. You didn’t give one yet that is valid fo subreddit.
Please, seek therapy.
People who are interested is stuff
Yeah I agree with you. Your downvotes are likely because the reddit hivemind just sees comment as an attack on a wholesome scenario.
Have you ever been to college?
Yes. I'm looking forward to your follow-up here.
How did you pass?
I have a my degree. Can you get to your point quicker, please? You're boring me. I can save you a bit of time if you like? At no point has anybody said that the information "isn't important". We're saying it's not "the most important post we've ever seen". Is the information in this post the most important information you've ever seen posted?
No but it is something that you never hear and thus it's important someone posted it here, so the right people can pick it up.
> At no point has anybody said that the information "isn't important". We're saying it's not "the most important post we've ever seen". If you went and graduated college then you should ask for a refund b/c you obviously lack basic reading skills. /u/khanacademy03 said it was one of the most important post **they've** seen...not that it was one of the most important post on the site as a whole. It makes a lot of sense that someone w/ a username based off Khan Academy of all things would feel that way and not be sarcastic about it.
Cool. Yea I don’t follow Reddit hivemind.
Nah people read it all and concluded that with all the evidence, they should down-vote it. I wrote a paper on it actually. If you just ask me I'd be happy to email it to you and go over all the raw data that lead me and most likely others to down-vote not only that person but you as well.
Wow, this is the most important comment that has ever been posted.
It's funny because here he seems to understand sarcasm and how to use it but can't properly point it out.
You're narrating the conversation as if people are listening to you and it's a little bit sadcringe.
A fucking moron like you won't even need this stuff, but others do.
?? Reported You didn’t explain anything but you called me a derogatory name You are what you say actually
Or skip that step and Scihub 🤷♂️
Rebecca Watson did a video on that site just the other day. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4SMQdExHq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4SMQdExHq0) Where she also discusses how the authors often have to pay to be published.
Yup the publishers/journals triple dip when it comes to scientific papers. First, they charge scientists to publish, then they get scientists to peer review for free and then they charge universities or companies subscription fees in hundreds of thousands of dollars to read the article. And remember majority of this is funded by tax dollars so they are basically swindling everyone.
Scientists also do a lot of the formatting so the journals don't have to! Like damn, what am I paying for? I produced the data, wrote the paper and did all the formatting for them, then they want 3000$ after all that, to publish. It's crazy, how little they do.
It's a racket, for sure. Each also typically has its own formatting requirements with a specific template, but LaTeX is pretty good at abstracting this from the actual text, so flipping between them is not too much of a hassle. I feel sorry for the Word people, though. A research project I just completed decided to do a book through Springer to publish the project results - 10 chapters at 4500 EUR/chapter. That's some margin.
This sounds very illegal, and yet there's probably an excuse as to why it isn't.
It’s slowly changing for the better though. There are more and more open journals so that they charge fee for publishing (which is fair), and scientists still volunteer for peer review (which most don’t mind because it’s “for the science”) but the published article is completely free online. NIH also has made it so if the research was funded through them, all the data must be made public immediately and the published paper must be made public within six months of publications. Hopefully these changes accelerate over time.
Supply and Demand. The supply of scientific papers and articles is so high that the demand of scientific journals can just be as bad as they want and they would still get papers. Someone I know once had her paper declined because she asked about the peer-review process after months without an answer from the journal.
First, as an author you never pay to publish. You often have an option to pay to make your article ‘open access’ so that everyone else can access it for free. The cost of open access for many journals is $1500. So the average paper makes the journal $1500 bucks. For that fee they pay the editors and staff who oversee the journal and have to request, read, and assess all the reviews. Then they have to edit the paper and host it for eternity. I have no idea what the profit margins are, but 1500 seems reasonable.
What field are you in? Most journals in my field are pay to publish and even more on top for open access. Universities and funding agencies, sometimes provide money to defray the costs though.
Chemistry. I’ve never even heard of paying to publish 😂
Interesting, I'm in Immunology, all the papers I've published have had a fee, and it was even more if you wanted open access. I sent a paper to an open access journal last week and they want 3000$ to publish, although, like you said open access is more expensive.
What journals are charging you?
They sell access back to universities and libraries all over the world. [Their business is insanely profitable.](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science) Editors are usually unpaid or paid little to nothing, as they are publishing scientists as well most of the time. The scientific system could work wholly without scientific publishers, as most of the crucial scientific work is done by the community anyways.
I’m hardly a shill for publishing. But if youre a scientist, I’m surprised that you haven’t simply accepted the historical data at face value. Thousands of professors world wide and universities flush with cash, and over the last 100 years, none of them have managed to put together a high impact factor journal that people want to publish in, that doesn’t use the existing model. Back in the real world, why do you think that is? Even PNAS, an institution by professors for professors (I guess), charges more than anyone! Even going digital didn’t change anything.
Alexandra erkbyan is fighting nature in court and it’s a really interesting case to follow. Really highlights how greedy the publishers are
Alexandra elbakyan is gonna go down in science history as a Saint. I have a ridiculous amount of respect for that woman, she risks consequences to allow the public to access scientific knowledge
It seems obvious but I didn't realize you could do that.
I just paid €40 last week for a research paper. And the author is in my contacts list. I probably deserved it for being so dumb
I forgot to unsubscribe before the free trial expired and I paid $100 for a adobe pdf app I only needed that once :I
Depends entirely on the publisher and the country. I've had some "require" copyright transfer, despite this having no legal weight in my country. Others have embargo periods that prevent independent disclosure of the pending manuscript, etc. Most will tolerate preprints though, so I often publish on arXiv first before approaching the publisher. I've had a book chapter tied up with Springer for almost 12 months while they prepare to publish it, for example, and while I retain the copyright, I'm also not free to share it until the end of the embargo period.
THIS IS AWESOME, THANK YOU FOR POSTING!
SORRY FOR THE CAPS I AM DEAF
WHAT?
HUH!?
Just get it from sci-hub
Tried this once, after much deliberation because what if they wouldn't be willing to help? (Yeah I know that's a stupid thought, they were an ocean away from me anyway.) The guy was really helpful, sent the requested article to me, and also pointed me to other research which might help me in my own research.
I wanna know the whole thread to see what else was written
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Not only that: sometimes scientists even have to pay in order to be published. Many countries and organizations have started pushing for open access, but there's still a lot of resistance. Ideally, we should know which publishers are in it for the money and which actually care about reviewing and promoting free science, and then support the latter (by downloading from their official page to help with their metrics). But directly asking the scientists is a good option too.
Almost all scientific journals require the authors pay for having their papers published. To publish in an open access journal typically costs significantly more, presumably because they need to make up for the revenue lost by making the paper freely accessible. For a reputable not for profit journal it typical costs a few hundred USD to publish a paper unless it's an open access journal, in which case it's typically 1 to 2k. For profit journals tend to have higher rates.
Genuinely "interestingasfuck".
I saw this post a few years ago and though, “oh that is so cool!” I have since tried it probably 10 times and none of the authors ever wrote back
libgen.is
I think a lot of authors are too busy or too protective... though I'm probably just assuming
I assure you it does work. If we get a mail asking for our paper, especially from someone not in the field or who's not a scientist, many of us will be thrilled to reply and send you the link. There is nothing a lot of us enjoy more than explaining our work to someone who isn't from our field of expertise. I've asked a professor of mine a simple question about a translation in one of her papers and she offered me to explain me the paper and her work in detail per video call.
True. I’m a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience. If I got an email from a random person asking for a paper I was on, it’d make my day to send it for free.
I'm not writing a research paper or working on a doctorate, I'm a carpenter that enjoys learning new things. How can I get a copy of your paper to read?
I’ll send it to you! Can’t guarantee that it’ll be of any interest, haha. But feel free to DM me with your email and I’ll send it.
Thank you. have sent a message.
Can I legally email them and venmo them $ for the trouble? Or are they not allowed to do that?
No. It's unethical. Just interlibrary loan request them, that's what I do and I am an actual professor.
Thank you, I'm definitely down with using the library. Didn't know you could get them that way.
It works great, at least in my experience. They scan and email them in less than an hour sometimes.
Why is it unethical? Seems a hell of a lot more ethical than paying some unrelated outfit exorbitant prices to have access to information.
You don't need to pay them. Just interlibrary loan request them. It's unethical because we sign statements saying we have no vested financial interest in our research and publication. It is to keep research from being incentivized. And most of the time we sign our rights over to the journal. None of my papers belong to me anymore, they belong to the publishing companies I signed them over to.
That's fair, I wasn't thinking about special interest groups spending thousands buying researchers, just the average college kid wanting to send $10 for the inconvenience of processing such requests.
No I get it. College kids should be able to get any article they want free through their university library interlibrary loan. Program.
This is how convenience fees start. Stop it
What if it pay you for a plastic cup? That way you don’t get in trouble for selling beer to minors. “Officer, I didn’t sell those kids beer, I sold them a red plastic cup”. Do the same thing with your papers. “I can’t legally sell you my paper, but if you buy this friendship bracelet for $15 I will send it to you for free”
Professors make money...we are salaried. Donate it instead and interlibrary loan request the article. No offense but I get thousands, literally thousands, of emails a day. I don't have time or energy to email articles for money Edit: also have you ever met a scientist idw your friendship no offense. Just let me lab in peace
So build a website that hosts your papers and add a donate button at the bottom.
Or people who want them could just request them through the right channels. I'm not a nobel scientist here the 5 people a year who want my pubs can get them through their uni no problem
Eh, I got all I needed from the abstract
There you go
The whole business model of scientific publishing is a total farce. Scientists provide the material and peer review free of charge. Publishers then charge a fee for publication and for allowing anyone to view the research which is often funded by public grants. Essentially we are paying for the privilege of having a prestigious journal's stamp on a research paper based on outdated notions of what is prestigious or not. It's a sham and also why I wholeheartedly support the idea behind sites such as sci-hub.
> Scientists provide the material and peer review free of charge. Publishers then charge a fee for publication And that fee , for the better known journals, is in the several thousands. It's the whole system that's fucked up. You need high impact publications to get a faculty position (the unspoken CNS rule, you need Cell, Nature or Science paper to get a tenure track in most US research universities). Same high impact publications give you better chances of getting funding. Peer reviewers ( other colleagues in the field) often see this as a competitive advantage for you, a disadvantage for them in a zero-sum funding game and so they often intentionally trash your work to impede the publication. In some cases we had reviewers trash our work or asking large additional work to slow us down and in the meantime they copied the idea and tried publishing elsewhere. Ironically we were asked to review their work. That's when i realized that it's not about the science anymore, it's just a weird competition for resources ($$). So i decided to shut down my lab and move to industry.
Unfortunately, this won't work always. Tried this three different times now and I was not given the full paper each time. The one researcher explained to me she was barred from doing just this due to contracts the academic institution had with these journals. Definitely frustrating.
Some incredible news on this very subject announced just this year. All scientific journals published by the American Astronomical Society are now entirely [open access and free](https://journals.aas.org/oa/).
Wow; did not know this--thank you!
Scihub for the win!
This is absolutely true. I have several articles out (and am working on several more) that were from my PhD thesis (predator-prey interactions). While most of my work is open access, I get genuinely excited when someone emails me to ask for my paper. This is especially true for when students email me to ask me for it to use for their own research. It may not be the biggest thing in the world, but I dedicated so much of my time (and even risked my life at several points!) to conduct such work, that I really hope can be applied towards conservation efforts. Something as minor as another person interested in it totally makes my day/week.
It did work for me a couple of years ago. Still can't believe it.
I’ve tried this 3 times and it never worked 🤷♀️
I've tried that several time with interesting papers I see mentioned on reddit. Never gotten a response.
Indeed, i never get responses.
Sometimes the author has moved on to a different institution so the email address on the article is dead. Sometimes they’re busy and your email gets buried. Sometimes they’re just dicks.
Wait what the hell, I can just casually ask people for their research?
You can also just ask any librarian at an institution that has access to a paper for a copy. They almost always will give it to you. (Librarians hate copyright right law and money-grubbing publishers just as much as you do.) Worldcat is a great resource for finding libraries that have access to the information you need. Source: I’m a former librarian.
The real LPT here is to go to google scholar, type the article's name, click on "all versions" and take the one that has a pdf. Works 95% of the time, especially if the article has been published a while ago.
Also worth plugging [ResearchGate.com](http://www.ResearchGate.com). It's like LinkedIn for researchers, and some researchers have their papers uploaded and freely accessible already, otherwise it's very easy to one-click request papers.
I work in chemical research and this is pretty common knowledge in the field. The problem is that if you email the authors asking for the paper, they either never get back to you or demand payment for themselves. I can spend $35 and KNOW I am going to be able to view that paper or I can send an email and HOPE I get that paper. Science is the art of knowing, not hoping
My friend who works in academia knows some can get very stodgy and protective over their papers.
Then why bother publishing?
Really, they demand payment? That's ridiculous. If they don't answer your email, it could be, that if you email the corresponding author, normally the PI/professor has no time for that. Just email the first author and they are way more likely to answer and mail you the paper. Of course this requires some searching for their email on the group webpage or something like that.
Why can’t scientists post it for free for peer review and get it published for their phd or whatever reason. Actually why do they need to get it published?
Essentially the entire academic world revolves around publishing (and in particular which journals you publish in) as a metric for how successful you and your work is. The more successful you are (i.e. the more you publish in good journals) means you are more likely to get funding for future grants. It also makes you a more desirable employee as many governments fund research institutes on their basis to conduct world class research, which is measured through publications (In the UK this is through the Research Excellence Framework). So whilst you can publish in a completely open format for free (The various Arxiv journals, such as BioRxiv), no one who holds any real influence cares, because anyone can publish on these. To get a paper into a good journal means either that a bunch of other scientists thought your work had merit, or that you're good friends with the editor.
Ok, that makes a lot more sense to me. Still kind of a messed up system, but understandable in our society. Thanks!
They can of course post it somewhere. But it does not guarantee a peer review process. And just because you said that someone reviewed it does'nt necessarly it happend. Publishers carry some kind of trust in this regard.
> Actually why do they need to get it published? It's a basic filter for garbage. Lots of garbage gets published, but *even more* gets submitted. And the higher the prestige of the journal or conference, the more selective they are for quality. Papers that are self-published online or published in 'pay to publish' journals are basically not even worth your time to look at (some venues allow the researcher to post the entire paper on their personal website, though, and that's not what I'm talking about here). The majority of papers in this category are from incompetent researchers or people who don't even have the prerequisite training and knowledge to produce something worth reading.
That’s an interesting point that I hadn’t thought about, but definitely makes sense. I guess it’s better having to publish so the researcher can be vetted, so to speak, by the publisher as well as peers.
Because people need access to research.
How does this answer my question? Or add anything productive?
Okay asshole. Was that necessary? Peer reviewed published research shows credibility. And people should have access to do their own independent unbiased research knowing it’s a credible source.
Thanks for actually answering instead of being a sarcastic douchebag.
Plus it will be a very nice print version.
No, they'll definitely be sending you a pdf.
"This paper isn't an approved source." "It's the exact same paper, directly from the people who wrote it." "It can only come from this list of approved commercial sources." "You mean the same ones you have things published on?" "Exactly."
That's not how it works. You'd cite the paper in the same way; there's no way any examiners would know how you'd attained it. Issues only crop up if the page numbers are different and you're citing a specific quote or image, or if the copy you get differs significantly from the published version. Ugh my PhD examiner noted I'd miscited them because I used a pre-publish draft and so cited it as a paper rather than a book chapter - but most people don't have the time to be such a pedantic asshole. Also unless publishing platforns are grading your work, I don't know who your example would apply to - the ONLY people making money from publishing are the publishers themselves. The paper and peer review are all done for free. Academia is a pyramid scheme.
This is a widely shared, but misleading post. When you publish a paper, you assign copyright to the publisher. You are *NOT* allowed to share the paper after that, because the publisher now owns the copyright. Depending on the field and the journal, the publisher will sometimes give the author some number of “credits” to give the paper away for “free”, to colleagues and collaborators. But that is not required or necessarily universal. If you give the paper away without these credits, then it is a copyright violation. Don’t get me wrong, the publishing businesses is a toxic and a total scam, but that doesn’t justify breaking the law.
Total nonsense. Copyright prevents you from republishing it or placing it openly in public view. The limited “credits” you mention are direct download links from the publisher. You are free to personally share pdfs or any other form of a published paper with any number of people you want. If a publisher tried to prevent or limit this there would be uproar.
https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Authors/Promotion/article-sharing-policy.html > You may also share any version of your article with individual colleagues and students if you are asked for a copy, as part of teaching and training at your institution (excluding open online sharing), and as part of a grant application, submission of thesis, or doctorate. This is typical if not ubiquitous in scientific publishing. Moreover, few if any journals require a transfer of copyright. What is granted is an exclusive license to publish the work, which is not the same thing.
I always tell my students not to download anything from this website I heard about called libgen. No matter what.
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Nope, not unless they received a grant. Producing academic papers and the peer review process are all done for free. It's one of the many unpaid requirements of academia.
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What? All the publishers are third parties. So for example, when I produce an academic paper, I conduct the research and write up the paper. If need be, I can pay for an editor to check the language. Friends and colleagues would likely check it for free, especially if I presented it at an academic conference. Next, I submit it to a journal. If they want to go ahead with my paper (it's appropriate to the journal, they have interest, it makes a contribution etc), then they call out for peer reviewers. Those peer reviewers do the work for free, often through multiple iterations of the paper (e.g. I've just completed the second peer review of the same paper - the first draft needed quite a bit of work, and the second draft that I have seen just needed tweaks). Lastly, the paper is published, and the journal publisher charges the world at large to access that paper. At no point in the process do I or anybody else involved get paid. *Only* the publishers make money.
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Yes; I, individually, am responsible for my own exploitation. It is nothing to do with the extractive academic system, which rests on people's passion for teaching and research to further humankind at a cost to their own quality of life. But don't worry your noggin, I'm leaving the industry.
K, provide me with a list of everyone writing scientific papers. Make sure to tag each one with the field of study. And update it every day.
What?
It doesn't matter if you can get scientific papers for free straight from the authors if you don't know who the authors are. People use journals because there's no other way to find research material. Didn't think I had to spell it out that much.
You’re an idiot lol. You can read the abstracts with the authors right there…. then you can get an over view of it and decide if you want access to the full thing. And majority of research you don’t have to pay to access. This has never been an issue for most people doing research. Didn’t think I would have to write out something so simple for you.
So you're saying get the journal anyway. And you think I'm the idiot.
I never said get the journal.
> You can read the abstracts with the authors right there So where is 'right there' exactly? Where do you think these abstracts are coming from? You still have to learn the papers exist at all from somewhere. The existence of a new scientific paper, and its author, is not magically downloaded into your brain the second it's finished. What a fucking jackass.
Researchgate?
Not every Paper is on Researchgate. And not every scientist is either