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.
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.)
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.
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.
Lots of people upload their research to ResearchGate (even though I really dislike the site for other reasons), make it available from their research group's web page, or in some fields upload it to ArXiv or BioRxiv. It's usually not against the terms of paywalled journals to do any of these things. Google Scholar or even the regular Google search engine can be decent at finding these PDF links. As a last resort, if you're serious about wanting to read a paper, you can contact the corresponding author, who will usually email you a copy and be glad you are interested in his/her work, though this becomes a bit impractical if you need access to multiple references.
There are still many papers left behind paywalls. It does depend on the field you're in, as reflected by other comments.
I left academia years ago but continue to (try to) do research. Resources like scholar.google.com can often help find a free-to-read version of a paper, which is great. But access to a single key paper can make or break your progress. I've personally dropped many, many hours of work because of this problem - I couldn't reasonably access key literature that I needed.
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.
There are four barriers to entry: 1) acquire the possible publications, 2) determine if it's in the public domain, and 3) face likely legal action design to suck away time and money, 4) come up with a good revenue model.
1) isn't easy because access to the the newest publications require a user agreement. I think it can be done by starting with SciHub since SciHub hasn't signed an agreement in the first place. For older publications, paper scans are possible, but also expensive.
2) is easiest in those rare cases where the paper says "this paper was authored by an employee of the United States and is not subject to copyright", or something similar. Otherwise, it might be inferred from the author's institutional affiliation ("William J. Wiswesser, US. Department of Agriculture, Frederick, Maryland 21701" to pull an example from one paper in my collection). This is labor intensive and therefore expensive.
3) While the US doesn't recognize a "sweat of the brow" doctrine, other place might. Even if a public domain archive were legal, it could be sued for, say, knowingly trying to subvert the policies in #1. (Also, will these documents have the same DOI as what the publisher uses? Might they sue for copying that in violation of some user agreement on their web site?)
4) Yeah, I've no clue how to make money off of this. Especially if SciHub is part of the competition.
"for example from their authors"
Wiswesser, above, died in 1989. I'm going through a lot of historical papers these days.
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.
Unfortunately though, a lot of the papers that turn up in Google Scholar are behind paywalls. It is very expensive to get hold of academic papers if you don't work/study somewhere with an institutional licence (anything from $10 upwards per paper).
As you point out, not all academic institutions have this access. For example, a college which only teaches undergraduates is unlikely to subscribe to the specialist journals, even though a couple of the professors will be interested in those topics. (One common solution is for, say, the chemistry professors to get a personal ACS membership, which gives access to a limited number of ACS journal articles per year.)
There are researchers at companies. There are researchers with no affiliation. Many have an issue with paywalls even though you haven't.
I'm a self-employed software developer in cheminformatics who also does research in the history of the field. I can do this because the local(ish) chemistry library has most of the papers on paper in the basement. It's a public library, supported by my taxes. Otherwise it would be very expensive to get copies of the hundreds of papers I've read or looked through.
As an example, one of the papers from the 1960s has information I wanted in 'figure 2'. Only it turns out that figure 2 was swapped with figure 2 from the next paper in the journal. Both papers were by the same author. I don't know if it's an author error or a layout error by the journal. It would have been much harder to figure that out if I had to ask friends at another site for a copy of the paper in the first place.
So yes, I am a researcher whose research is restricted by the cost of reading the latest journals. My decision to look at the history of the field, rather than the present, is partially influenced by the fact that I have better (read "cheaper") access to the old materials than the new. Interlibrary loan is amazing.
Most academic institutions pay to have access to the large academic sites. If you do need to read a paper that's still behind a paywall, you usually email someone at a different university who does have access, or even just look up the authors academic page, which will often have a pdf. So I can't see paywalls being an issue. It certainly never was for me or my former colleagues.
It doesn't help that most research papers are behind paywalls, or in forgotten books long out of print but still in copyright (and owned by the publisher, not the author), buried and not scanned theses, or technically published in patents but then also unusable by anyone interested.
Keep in mind, in math and other hard sciences it is not uncommon to cite 50 year old papers which are still highly relevant today (which is less common in biology). Such papers are often behind publisher paywalls since they predate arXiv. So closed access is very much a problem in these fields too.
Ghee, whiz, whod'dathunkit that opening up access to papers would lead to more people having access to papers which they'd then use to write more papers in which they cite those papers they read.
Even if you have institutional or individual access to the likes of Wiley or Elsevier it is usually far easier to just feed the DOI to Sci-Hub and read the paper instead of jumping through all the hoops to get 'official' access. This goes doubly for those who, like me, use whitelists for cookies and block third-party content (including cookies) since it generally takes a few attempts to convince the paywall that you just logged in for the umpteenth time and can I now please read that paper please? Nope, thou shalt not pass!
aw shucks, I'll just get the thing off Sci-Hub again.
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.
Short answer: scihub
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