I kind of hoped for an actual torrent tracker rather than central site that can be easily taken down. But never mind :)
Introducing The Paper Bay
61–70 of 91 posts
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#62With 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…
"breaking their contract with the publisher"
The publishers only own the copyright to the particular typesetting of the paper (which was originally the useful service they provided academics) and as such, without their special-sauce theme that adds the journal name and page numbers on, it's fine for you to distribute it, host it online for free, etc. (Incidentally, this is also the case with sheet music, which is why it's legal to enter a score into a MIDI program and print it out, but not to photocopy it.)
As I say, this is probably not a universal fact, and will depend on what the terms of the journal submission was, and indeed for the book mentioned there was probably a specific contract at some point. Although, if there were small changes between the book and the thesis, the author was probably within her rights to email (and indeed host online) the thesis for free.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you know about a paper you don't have and doesn't have any cites and is 50 years old? How can a paper be perennial if it doesn't have any cites? A paper being perennial is, I'd argue, defined by getting cites on a regular basis even after many years. Who does theoretical physics / mathematics and doesn't have access to a university library? And don't say Ramanujan, people in those circumstances wouldn't hav…
I know of at least one person who is doing lots of science / scientific projects/experiments for themselves and does not have access via uni libraries etc. but needs to consult scientific literature (as in, academic papers) fairly often. (Granted, the case does not fall within the aforementioned 'theor.phys. / mathematics' field.) They use http://reddit.com/r/scholar to ask for papers to be uploaded (it's a very nice…
But he probably does it because it's just easier than getting a subscription to a university library. Proving my point exactly - how hard is it really to get access to academic papers? Most authors can't even find people that want to read their stuff. This whole 'I can't access research' is really 'there is no website where the 0.1% of people who don't have main stream and side stream access to journals can download them from'. Hardly the big threat to society it is sometimes made out to be.
Let me state again that I too would sometimes prefer one huge easily accessible database with all articles ever published, along with cites and H-factors and objective impact factor rankings and a bookmarking/personal library feature and maybe a pony too. Then again, the magnitude of that problem is miniscule compared to other problems I have I'd much rather see solved, or spend my time on. And my experience says most of the people in my work field feel the same.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know of at least one person who is doing lots of science / scientific projects/experiments for themselves and does not have access via uni libraries etc. but needs to consult scientific literature (as in, academic papers) fairly often. (Granted, the case does not fall within the aforementioned 'theor.phys. / mathematics' field.) They use http://reddit.com/r/scholar to ask for papers to be uploaded (it's a very nice…
But he probably does it because it's just easier than getting a subscription to a university library. Proving my point exactly - how hard is it really to get access to academic papers? Most authors can't even find people that want to read their stuff. This whole 'I can't access research' is really 'there is no website where the 0.1% of people who don't have main stream and side stream access to journals can download…
I generally agree. At the same time, it's good to have tools for such edge cases - there are some papers in niche journals etc. which play a part in science but may not be easily attainable (again, because e.g. public libraries do not pay for subscriptions for those journals and whatnot.) But I agree with the gist of what you're saying (trying to come up with a universal user friendly system might be an overkill); but it is good to have these frustrations and debate in the open, and again, I really like that there is such a place as /r/scholar.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#65Could 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 fulfil…
> 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.
This would be a very simple but extremely helpful change. You only need to prepend http://dx.doi.org/ in front of the DOI, and make the resulting link clickable.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#66The UI is not very clean but I love the idea. I wish there was a browse feature. Some of us that aren't in college just enjoy enlightening our brain and would love to see what's already up on the site.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#67Could 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 fulfil…
> 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. This would be a very simple but extremely helpful change. You only need to prepend http://dx.doi.org/ in front of the DOI, and make the resulting link clickable.
Ok, I'll add that tonight.
edit: done.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#68Great effort! Please add https://peerj.com/ and http://www.mendeley.com/ to your list of resources.
I'll add those tonight, thanks!
Ok. done.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
But, again, those that can ask on the mailing list, also have the university subscription to go through pay walls. People outside investigation groups are left outside the party. You are not making a convincing argument that papers are already "free enough". Unless you assume all interested parties are from the academic world, that is...
"Unless you assume all interested parties are from the academic world, that is.." But seriously, how many people aren't? Yes yes there is always that one guy in his attic or log cabin... Most university libraries offer subscriptions to externals, too (mine does for less than 50 USD a year). So it's really only for people who are interested in academic materials, who are outside of any reach of a university (because r…
I work in the private sector with no academic affiliations. I find I use various IEEE/scientific papers roughly once a month. Some companies are small, and won't pay for things like papers. Some companies are large and have crappy bureaucracies/"cost saving measures" for getting a $15 paper off the internet. I'm not saying I need it all to be free, because I do always end up with the paper I want, I'd just like to add an anecdote that it's not all academia. But you're mostly right, access is not too much of a problem.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#70That's a great idea - but way to bury the lede there.
(And it just occurred to me that that's journalisms way of saying tl;dr. Except I did read it, just to find what the heck The Paper Bay is :)