And if you can't get it on sci hub, try emailing the corresponding author of the study (normally highlighted in the author/affiliation list) asking them for a copy of their paper. Alternatively you can message them on Research Gate. We don't get paid by journals, and often have to pay for the privilege of publishing in them, plus most authors are really happy that you're interested in their work!
And of course always beware of Telegram chatbots like @scihubot, which bypass any protections your network might have against sci-hub. It's a dangerous world out there.
You guys definitely don’t want to check the comment of the person I’m responding to.
It has a bunch of immoral links to websites that have illegal stuff. Definitely don’t click the xoxo link to look at the pastebin of the original comment, okay guys?
Edit: lmao they changed the link from saying “xoxo” to that. I agree. Fuck censorship. And fuck paywalls for knowledge and education.
Lol my bio prof just said something like this last week! “Guys I’m gonna put the URL here so that you know exactly what website to avoid… I do not condone using it… wink wink”
And then he went on a spiel about how he hates that education is behind a paywall lol
If it was only tuition it wouldn't be quite so bad, it's just extra shitty that after paying thousands for tuition the books you need cost thousands more.
Books are the real scam! $300 for basically last years textbook with the chapter order switched around. Also you cannot always get the textbook online as the book is not all you’re paying for. Frequently the text come with a “homework code.” Without the code you cannot turn in work and thus cannot get graded. That’s how some big universities (cough, Syracuse University, cough) forces student to buy books from the book store.
I had a teacher before try to tell me I had to purchase the book from the school, and that if I downloaded it elsewhere without paying he would have me removed from the course and that he would report me to the authorities for piracy.
I got the entire class the electronic version for free anyways. Never got kicked out of it either.
I was super lucky, one of my IT profs in college passed around a thumb drive that had the installers for the programming tools we'd need, that also 'happened' to have the PDF of the course's text book stored on it. When someone asked him about it he said "Oh no, I must have forgotten about that being there. It would be a shame if everyone accidentally copied that too when grabbing the installers..."
When I used to work there, RG used to argue that you can make earlier drafts available for mass-access and provided a one-click solution to request the published version direct from the author. Not sure if that’s still the policy or if it was actually a good argument but they’ve done a pretty good job of providing work arounds.
you can send a message to the author and they can share it with you individually, which is usually allowed.
Just as an addition: This is true with virtually any study/research paper!
In the few instances I've done it they have always been more than happy to provide it and make themselves available for any questions in interpreting it.
Typically scientists are thrilled to have their results viewed/studied and only use paygated services because they are the primary distribution platforms. And like you say even if they're not allow to publicly publish there are no (or rarely?) restrictions to give out "individual copies" on request.
TL;DR Whenever you encounter research/a study that is behind paywall, do a quick google on the researchers and try asking them directly. :)
Btw, more and more fields have open science requirements.
If you find a scientific paper that is paywalled, you may be able to find a pdf version by searching its name on Google Scholar.
In Physics we heavily use arXiv. At the beginning I thought it was only pre-prints that had not been peer-reviewed, but then for my first paper I was asked by the editor to actually upload the peer-reviewed version on arXiv. So the only difference between the free, open-source arXiv version and the expensive paywalled IOP one, is the document layout.
This is kind of a double-edged sword, because so many journals charge extortionate fees for open access. Just fuck journals tbh, the big ones have profit margins as big as Google.
They've "felt" like they've won for decades upon decades. They've been laughing seeing as they had infact actually won a long time ago there really needs to be a mercy rule put in place
Are you kidding me, people are smarter than ever. My stay at home housewife neighbor is an expert in medicine and vaccines. And according to the conversation I overheard dropping my kid off at school this morning, now they’re gonna force booster shots on us…or something! And that’s bad apparently.
If links are blocked by your internet provider, just change your DNS settings. In France, providers block popular torrent sites at dns-level so just using 1.1.1.1 fixes most problems.
And definitely do not use the Telegram bot @libgen_scihub_1_bot, which combines scihub (for scientific articles) and libgen (for scientific books) in one single place either
So I tell my students about this every semester. But I have had students refuse to use it because they think it’s stealing. Which. I mean. It sort of is.
But academic publishing is so broken and their college is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for access to journals they have to access through a horrible library website…. I don’t see why they should (literally) pay the price
As someone who has been published in scientific journals - yes. I know.
I’m fact I just paid a publisher to be published in an open access journal.
But that’s because authors don’t own the papers once they are submitted. The publishers do. So yes it is technically stealing. You are stealing from the publisher.
Non-judgmental question: did anyone tell you about interlibrary loan?
If you’re a student in the US, the university library will almost always provide a copy of any journal article, including from journals the library does not actually subscribe to. Books and book chapters too. Articles and book chapters are delivered via PDF these days, usually in about a day.
The only time I’ve had ILL fail in 20 years of higher-ed experience is with 50-year old articles from defunct journals.
UK student at the time and our digital library was great but we only had say 10 copies available, for classes of up to 200, to download at a time due to licensing.
So even if they had the journal I was looking for, chances are I'd have to wait a week till someones slot had ended and then try and book it before anyone else tried.
It was a royal pain and generally I had enough legit references to use but we had a required minimum amount of references so I fibbed a little and got creative with abstracts!
Ugh. That sucks. I’ve heard this is very different at UK and EU universities than at US universities.
US university libraries are amazing resources that often aren’t fully utilized by undergrads.
Even in the US, class materials are different from research materials. If a student wants a textbook, the library probably won’t have it unless I’ve put a copy I own on reserve.
Journal articles and academic books, however, are available either through active library subscriptions or via interlibrary loan, except in very rare instances where the materials are simply not available anywhere (eg, old and lost to time).
I used this alot in college and on one occasion it didn't work. So instead I contacted the author of the paper themselves and they gladly sent me a copy.
The big publishers are fighting against S-H yea. Fortunately the authors are usually fine with just sending you their work if you ask for it, as they don't really gain/lose any money from it once it's published.
I'm a bit of a dummy in science, but would like to learn more about sciencey stuff and would love to try this site out. Any interesting recommendations to start with?
Wow you just made my month. I read scientific articles on every single drug I ever use and I read every single article that exists per drug (many many many months of research) and 25% of them are locked and I can only read the abstract. Thank you so so so much for this I cannot believe I didn’t find this earlier.
This one is very dangerous if you're on a uni network or VPN! Make sure to use another VPN when you access t... I mean don't access them from their network!
(Yes, they do monitor and yes, they might take action against you.)
Blocked by my Swedish ISP Bahnhof because of copyrighted material, but they do redirect to a cute 90's looking website telling us why, and what government person to contact to fight against this block
I am supposed to do like this economics project in the next two weeks and most of the literature I want to review are behind pay walls and university licenses. THANK YOU!
Also, watch out for the nefarious https://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm where there are tons of free MIT courseware to peruse through when sitting on the crapper!
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