I don't think it's behind a paywall; it's CC licensed. I can access it and I'm not connected to an academic network at the moment.
On a broader note, there's a big push for open access at the moment (as there should be), so there's no longer a need to assume that a paper is behind a paywall just because it's on a journal's website anymore.
Almost all papers are legally available from the researchers’ websites anyway. I’m not sure it’s the big deal everyone makes it out to be in the first place. I very very rarely find a paper I want is paywalled in the first place.
What's really grating here is that that paper behind the paywall is one for which the 'online rights' have never been negotiated for so the paywalled version should really have been in the public domain. This goes for almost all scientific papers up to 1995.
Here is my kettle logic for you to not even try getting around that paywall:
Old papers that are not publicly accessible on the web are very likely just a pile of craps and not worth reading; even if it was worth reading, its information should have been compiled in better ways in textbooks/blog posts; if neither were applicable, then you are supposed to be some researcher working in academia and can ask your institute to offer the access.
Unfortunately, the actual research paper is behind a paywall. I wonder what do intelligent people think about placing publicly funded research behind paywalls.
I'm fairly certain that it's not the authors of the papers. Hiding away research behind paywalls and subscriptions is extremely weird and counter productive to free and open research.
If you know that a paper exists, you can just email the authors and ask if they'll send you a pdf. My guess is that most will just send it to you, along with instructions on how to correctly cite them.
Years ago I had a Danish university lawyer look at me weird and ask if I was serious, when I asked what right a public funded university had to sell a patent to a US company. My logic was, and still is, that Danish companies already paid for the research and the patent via their taxes, so they should be legally allowed to use it for free. Apparently it's crazy talk to assume that something paid for by the tax payers should actually belong to those tax payers.
Where is the effort to get these articles published freely without having a private entity act as a middleman?
This problem of publicly funded research only available behind a paywall is a bipartisan issue. The main issue is that there appears to be no movement or effort to push this forward so the public is largely uninformed.
People take it for granted that all academics have access to these paywalls. My institute recently cancelled subscriptions to major Nature journals due to financial constrains, forcing us to end up with personal subscriptions.
In a delicious piece of irony[1], the paper that this post refers to appears to be behind a paywall, illustrating one of the causes of the problem. (Edit: since the post is erroring out, the link to the abstract is: http://pus.sagepub.com/content/19/1/115)
My field (computer science) and a few others at least don't have the problem of paywalls. Authors always make their works available; a few publishers have relaxed their copyright policies and others have an implicit promise not to sue. It's not ideal, but it's not too bad.
Public communication, however, remains quite bad. It is very unfortunate that in the current system, researchers have no incentive to communicate with the public or do anything except rack up publications and citations.
I write a blog about my research (http://33bits.org) and I've been pleasantly surprised by the level of public interest. In my ideal world, research grants would come with some strings attached to get scientists to fulfill some of their social responsibility.
antognini pointed out the preprint already, but I wanted to note that articles in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and The Astrophysical Journal become open-access after a year.
If they're from publicly funded universities I'd wish the scholarly work would be free. I understand things coming out of Microsoft Research, for example, being pay-walled.
That is not true. I work in neuroscience and often find myself not having access to "just released" papers. Some of them may appear as preprints months later, if the author bothers to do so. I 've tried to email authors for copies a few times with no response. Even my institution doesn't provide access to all the journals we need (probably the situation is different in the US). There are actually underground websites for searching paywalled journals through proxies.
TBH, historic papers are not that interesting anymore, since the most important ones are cited in more recent research. It's the cutting edge research where it's more annoying. What's more important though is that closed-access is depriving science of the ability to use automated tools for textual analysis. I hope this unfortunate event will motivate more people to realize that having unrestricted access to scientific results is an extremely important issue.
Paywalls are still common. But mostly with legacy publishers that are increasingly marginalized by newer ones. When it comes to scientific publications there are a few holdouts. But by and large, scientists and universities are increasingly reluctant to spend significantly on paywalls.
It used to be more or less automatic that universities would allocate huge chunks of public funding to maintaining all sorts of subscriptions. Tens of thousands of our EU project budgets were actually earmarked for this in the nineties. There was no debate about any of that at the time. These days there is a bit more scrutiny and quite a few universities are refusing to do this at this point.
I actually had to go to a library in the nineties to get my hands on some articles when I was doing my PhD. But even then, this was rare for me. So rare in fact that I remember these handful of separate occasions where I had to do this. Even before Google launched, you could find a lot of .ps and .pdf files online. And in the rare case I couldn't, I often opted to ignore the work. I was skimming through papers by the dozens every week. Google made this stuff a lot easier when it launched. Computer scientists were early adopters of paywall evasion of course.
Something I figured out early was that as a scientist, making life easier for other scientists to access my work is not optional. The whole point of publishing your work is getting other people to read it. The best way of ensuring that never happens is paywalls. So, I put my articles on my website in the hope that people would actually read them.
The reason scientists continue to publish to pay-walled publications is that they are financially incentivized by impact metrics. You publish in something like nature, it looks great and your metrics improve and your boss loves you. Of course, most scientists don't actually get published there and instead have to deal with some severe yawn inducing second or third rate journals by the likes of Elsevier, Springer, and others. Been there done that.
And since it's all about impact, getting published is only half of the success. The other half involves getting people to reference your work. Which requires them to be able to access it. Which pretty much requires you to enable that by putting the pdf somewhere for people to download. Either you do that or nobody reads your papers.
Hence the practice of these articles in paywalled publications getting published online elsewhere. Paywalls have never been good at preventing that or putting a stop to that practice. Scientists actively depend on enabling paywall evasion to get their metrics up.
So the main conclusions of the paper were not behind a paywall, just the full paper. And yet it still went unseen. Probably more because it was an old paper in a journal with a miniscule impact factor [1]. Even if it was open access, I really doubt that would have changed anything.
There are problems here, and I'm a huge open access supporter, but blaming this on a paywall seems like a red herring.
The top 10 paywalled articles are all from the 20th century. The Open Access movement is great but it doesn't do anything to free up papers from the past.
A large part of the problem is the ridiculous duration of copyright. "Adsorption of Gases in Multimolecular Layers" is from 1938 and still paywalled.
In practice, almost all papers this popular will be available on random .edu sites and Google Scholar will find those technically-forbidden copies for you. But it is a significant problem if you don't have an institutional affiliation and you want to read articles that aren't among the top 5% cited. (Or at least it was a problem for me before sci-hub; I retained academic contacts who could email me any papers I wanted, but I had to cross a pretty high interest threshold before I'd bug someone to request that favor.)
These are papers that are published in journals, by definition they are publicly available, you just have to pay the $20-40 fee, email one of the authors, or work at a university or company that has a subscription to said journals.
Where do you get this bizarre idea that the content of these journal is somehow not in the open?
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