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Comment by Ruud-v-A | Hacker News Reader

I try to avoid citing articles that are only available behind a paywall. Even though there isn’t always an alternative source available, if enough people favour citing open-access articles over paywalled ones, that should create an incentive to publish in open-access journals, because in academia, citations are everything. (That is a problem in itself, but it is the status quo.)

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I wish everyone would do this. Like a code of honor akin to a copyleft license: if you use open access references, your article should be open access too.

When reproducing findings of an openly accessible paper it's extremely frustrating when some of the references are unreachable.

I'm not in academia so for one I don't have university access to papers and for two I often need to trickle down the references to fill knowledge gaps.

It's just not always possible to do that. I know it can be frustrating to not have ready access to academic journals, but you can usually find the article one way or another. Many journals are allowing pre-print publications to reside on open-access archives ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_p... ), some will allow 'limited' distribution of either pre-print or published papers (generally means you have to ask the author for a PDF directly), and, with apologies to John Gilmore, the internet interprets copyright as damage and routes around it.

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