Great effort! Please add https://peerj.com/ and http://www.mendeley.com/ to your list of resources.
Introducing The Paper Bay
21–30 of 91 posts
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#22I submitted articleak, which something very similar a few days ago, but it didn't get upvoted. Maybe people on Hacker News do not like Tor?
The idea of using Tor is that the site is way harder for authorities to get down, and even if they do break Tor and get to the server, the users will still be entirely protected (there can't be any information about them in the logs or anything).
link: http://articleak.allalla.com/
submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5175234
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#23Curious... have you seen /r/scholar? I've requested a few papers from /r/scholar (under throwaways usually), and they've always obliged
Even within acadaemia, if you don't have access to a paper, it's common enough to ask your friends at other institutions if they can get it for you. We're mostly happy to share knowledge, and we don't feel much solidarity with the publishers who charge £30 for one PDF.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#24Get this on Tot/i2p. It'll never go down...
I agree with you on Tor and/or i2p. I don't know if you can be as categorical as "It'll never go down", but at least it will be significantly harder to get it down. And it can be anonymous, which is important of course for the people offering the service, but also to protect the users of the service…
I don't know if such a website can survive to the scientific publishers' lobby, especially when its builder is publicly known.
Edit: it seems this exists, as another comment point out on this discussion page.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#25Could you allow the requester to provide a link to the pay wall where they get stuck? People who have access to the paper through a university subscription could then easily click on that link and then immediately be taken to the paper. I imagine most people looking for a paper will already have come across this paywall and so will know where to find it. It would significantly reduce the overhead of the person fulfilling the request, but may be against the spirit of the site.
In many cases that I have come across, the DOI can be turned into a link that takes you to the article. Perhaps that would be enough.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#26The filling a request process appears to be more complex than it is due to superfluous form fields. The information about authors, title and DOI has already been entered by the requester. For the service to be a viable alternative, it should be (and appear to be) extremely simple to fill a request.
Tracking down a paper is time consuming enough, even if you are sitting on the network with access to most journals. Don't make it look like people have to type in additional information manually.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#27With the exception of old and obscure papers (i.e., 15 years or more and not cited in the last 5 years), I don't really see what the big problem is. I have yet to mail an author and not receive a pdf of the paper, usually within days, sometimes within minutes. When you have a reference and Google, you're seconds away from finding that author's current affiliation & email address. I once emailed the author of a book t…
I think I'm right in saying that by emailing you a copy of the PDF, many authors are breaking their contract with the publisher. It's a few years since I published an academic paper but I've certain signed over my rights more times that I care to recall. So while you can get a copy of the paper from the author officially that is not allowed. Thankfully most academics are not dickheads about this.
The key problem with journals is that much of what they do has been made obsolete over the last couple of decades by the move to electronic document distribution and the wonders of the WWW. Don't forget we are talking about private companies restricting the publication of academic research much of which has been funded out of the public coffers. Even the peer review is done, for free by academics. All that is left is the management of the process and distribution of the publications both of which I'd wager could be handled by the communities themselves as beautifully and repeatedly demonstrated by open source software projects.
What the journals still retain is essentially kudos, but in a very real sense as academics are largely measured against their publication performance of which the 'currency' is the impact factor of the Journal. Academics need to publish in those Journals with a high impact factor so that their departments get a good rating and thus get more government funding (at least here in the UK). The key will be for a community lead Journal to attain a decent impact factor. Soon.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#28The filling a request process appears to be more complex than it is due to superfluous form fields. The information about authors, title and DOI has already been entered by the requester. For the service to be a viable alternative, it should be (and appear to be) extremely simple to fill a request. Tracking down a paper is time consuming enough, even if you are sitting on the network with access to most journals. Don…
At articleak (see my other comment), we only ask for the link to the paywall, and then if we could not get it from there (we make the http request via Tor for obvious reasons so it may fail some times) we ask you for the title of the paper, and that's all. So in the worst case you have to fill in two fields, but in most case, only one: the link to the paywall.
However, I would not be as hard as you seem to be with the pirate would made The Paper Bay. When you really need a paper and you already lost half an hour searching for it in the web ocean, it's okay to take 2 more minutes instead of 30 seconds to ask for it on such a service.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#29Thanks a lot, this is very nice and helpful. However... Aren't you afraid of going to jail?
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#30I never knew that Aaron was in the lineage of the guy behind the Mark Williams C Compiler.
Yes.
I was working at MWC when Aaron was born. I think I met Aaron once when he was two or three, just briefly. I knew him from stories told by others, and eventually by following his writings.
MWC was quite an interesting company in its own right.