I have trouble with someone who is also a domain squatter: http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/auction-of-domains-for-sale/
Weird that he didn't use openpapers.com / open-papers.com
Introducing The Paper Bay
81–90 of 91 posts
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#82I guess this will come in handy: https://github.com/kanzure/pdfparanoia
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#83I have trouble with someone who is also a domain squatter: http://www.jacquesmattheij.com/auction-of-domains-for-sale/
That word does not mean what you think it means:
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#84With 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…
One reason to promote more open and universal access to academic materials is to allow journalists and interested laypeople to read the actual papers referenced in news articles and press releases, deciding for themselves whether the press release was accurate. The idea is that more exposure to how research actually works will improve general scientific literacy and put an end to the constant barrage of states wanting to outlaw the teaching of evolution or cosmology.
Having a few academics e-mail an author to ask for a copy might be acceptable. Having thousands of educated laypeople constantly e-mailing authors simply doesn't scale.
Another reason is to permit anyone and everyone to do wide-scale analytics, instead of having to rely on the analyses that big, well-connected entities decide to run.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sure, but the kind of 'paper sharing' services such as proposed by the OP have the same problem. Many journals do allow you to share your own article, although I don't know the details by hard nor would I even know where to start looking for the conditions of publishing of my own papers. Your last two paragraphs illustrate my point, or rather the myopic viewpoint that these 'paper liberators' advocate - nobody outsid…
...it's not a big enough problem for actual researchers (as opposed to 'interwebs poasters with strong opinions about things they have little use for') to really matter.
This division between researchers and everyone else is exactly the kind of elitism that broader access to research is supposed to reduce. People fighting for open access aren't necessarily responding to an existing widespread demand, but anticipating the future benefits to society.
They are trying to be ahead of the curve, somewhat like the oft maligned RMS was ahead of the curve with his understanding of and fighting against DRM.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
You could also add the various other efforts in Open Access domain that were linked on this page to your http://thepaperbay.com/others/ page. There was at least Pirate University, articleak, and /r/scholar.
Also, while it's okay to have a somewhat complexe form to fill when making a request, it's really sad that it's as much work to share a paper, it should be very easy, in particular when clicking "I have this, send it", the form should have only one field: the file upload, or at least have the other prefilled with the request's values.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#87With 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…
Are you serious with your comment or trying to be provocative intentionally?
Have you tried to do active research without access to a university journal subscription? I have to ssh into an on-campus box at least two three times per day to get a paper. I won't necessarily read the whole thing, but glancing at it certainly helps me see what it is about much more than a one paragraph summary.
If I didn't have that I would be much less productive.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#88Your article is very well worded. I like the idea, but I am not sure if it is reasonable for people "on the inside" to spend time fulfilling requests.
Could there be a js solution to this? A volunteer inside the paywall could leave a tab open which periodically goes to get requests from the main paperbay queue and tries to fulfill them (you would need some robot-like functionality like find the PDF link). If success, it uploads the PDF. If fail (no subsc?), it can notify paperbay to put the request back in the queue.
With one requests every 10 minutes and 1000 volunteers you could have a 6000 paper/ hour rate of exodus.
BTW? Where are you hosted? How long do you think before they come for you if it gets big?
________________
PS: The protocol could be extended a bit it we need to handle captchas' as well. These really piss me off because I can't get the paper via ssh to campus + elinks!
R: requestor F: friend (inside paywall)
R-->tpb.com doi:10000x200 PLZ
tpb.com: resolve doi:10000x200, prepare scrape recipe.
tpb.com-->F could you get jrnl.com/yr/issue/33131/
F-->jrnl.com GET ...
Ftpb.com-->F form ans
F-->jrnl.com captcha form submit
RRe: Introducing The Paper Bay
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you download a paper from JSTOR or ScienceDirect, it is quite easy for them to add various watermarks to the PDF, and they already do (mildly). It might make it harder to scale this concept if the provider can track down who initially downloaded the paper (and presumably shared it).
request several incarnations and junk the diff
That's fine if you're technical enough to even know what that means; I'm worried about the people working outside the tech realm who could be unaware even of the personal risk when they try to help out.
Re: Introducing The Paper Bay
#90I 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.
I have fond memories of the compiler. I bought it when my roommate got an Atari ST in college. Very well documented and I learned a lot from the C source of emacs that came bundled with it. I wish I had that source to browse again today.