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Comment by throwawaymath | Hacker News Reader

Is it strictly true that authors are allowed to send you their papers if you email them? Are they allowed to send the published version, or must they send a preprint? If they can send you the published version, why can't they host it somewhere? And if they can only send the preprint version, why not put it up on arXiv anyway?

I don't mean to cast doubt on the tweet's purpose (I agree with it), and for what it's worth I've emailed other researchers for paper access as well. I would just like to see some proper legal analysis behind these questions, because I see the same point repeated frequently by scientists who are not lawyers.

It would be pretty cool if there were a platform that automated your request to get a paper from an author. I don't know how that would be plausible without hosting the papers though, and I imagine that would get into trouble.

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Yes. We can send papers to whomever we want. At one point, when you published a paper in a journal you’d get a stack of printed copies of your paper in the mail from the publisher that you were free to share with anyone. I think I have a few of those stacks around from papers I published 20 years or so ago.

Even if you technically aren’t allowed to share, that has NEVER stopped someone from sharing in my career. The only time I’ve had trouble with people sharing is if I ask for code to reproduce what they published. That usually is met with silence.

This is highly field-dependent. My old field – solid state physics – did reasonably well on reproducibility, not least because of a bunch of committed open-source folks who had been burnt by exactly this (and by licensing their previous code commercially and getting screwed by their publisher, preventing them from reproducing their own work) working on ABINIT (abinit.org), led by Xavier Gonze. There's a culture around sharing pseudopotentials, too, which is good.

SIESTA (icmab.es/siesta) is now open too, I note. That's the team I used to work alongside.

In my field (computational biophysics), it's pretty common practice to post published code on a git repository. Code used to produce published results absolutely should be accessible.

> Code used to produce published results absolutely should be accessible.

Although I agree with this sentiment, I think that if this was a requirement we would not get much more code but much less papers.

I'm not in academia so maybe I'm being flippant, but what is even the point of a paper whose results can't be reproduced? Are you really advancing knowledge in any meaningful sense if someone can't repeat what you did?

Exactly. In one recent case, someone published a paper about an interesting graph centrality metric that I was interested in trying out. Unfortunately, their description in the paper was far too vague to be useful - "implemented as a simple extension of Brandes' algorithm". In attempting to reproduce it, that meant I needed to go read up on the algorithm they extended, and then try to figure out how they actually extended it. In the end, I couldn't actually reproduce the work, and never heard back about the code that the authors used in their published work. That severely degrades the utility of the paper. Yes - the paper does contain some knowledge that they shared with the world, but it was difficult to build upon and replicate since they failed to describe what amounts to the experimental apparatus and setup that was used to obtain the results they published. Unfortunately, this is relatively common in CS (at least, the corners of CS where I work).

I know this is a big issue in AI/ML right now. Deepmind's papers are notoriously hard to reproduce, because they will lay out the general terms of the architecture but not specific implementation details - things like filter length, stride, number of layers, number of hidden units, feature selection, and all the little tricks of initialization or normalization or a zillion other subtleties.

The trouble being that those "specific implementation details" are typically non-obvious and absolutely crucial to getting the system described to work at all. For instance, as far as I know, nobody's managed to implement a WaveNet that sounds anything like as good as Google's samples. Neural Turing Machines - published three years ago - were so finicky that someone actually figuring out how to implement the damn thing and have it actually work as described was enough to warrant a paper of its own (Implementing Neural Turing Machines, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.08518.pdf). Not to mention how hard it is to iterate on failed replications when you aren't blessed with ten thousand Nvidia Teslas and custom tensor ASICs and have to wait eternities for models to train. At this point, I think most of the community just kind of looks at their papers, sighs in jealousy, and moves on.

You must make possible for other researchers to reproduce your work, but that does not mean you have to give it to them for free.

I work in an university, but in close collaboration with industrial companies. We use models that we explain with detail in our papers, so that other researchers can write their own implementations and maybe confirm or disprove our results. But we do not make the code available.

This is what I see, that does not mean I think it is the best approach. I would really like to release all the code I write. It would make research advance faster, and I do not think that it would harm the company who pays for my work in any way.

But they pay, and they have strict policies. At least they allow me to share most of my code with other researches in a personal basis and write papers about it. I am quite sure that, if to publish papers I had to always share the code, they would just directly hire me or someone else to do it and there would be no papers at all.

I think a lot of this depend on the field and context. For example in physics there are a lot of commercially available simulation tools that help with analysis of an experiment. You of course describe the approach and setup of the simulation but you can not publish/reference the source code since you are just a licensee.

Psychology is one of the worst offenders. A lot of junk science in that field. Some psych papers read more like advocacy than actual science.

https://www.nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-...

Your first move when trying to find a free version of a paper is to look up the lab webpage of the corresponding author's lab.

9 times out of 10 they have a mirror of the PDF.

And even if they don't, Master's theses and Ph.D. dissertations are often published in a searchable repository, hosted by the university. Look for recent graduates of the group you're interested in -- group websites ususally have lists of alumni. Their dissertations often contain versions of the papers you're interested in.

> or must they send a preprint?

What do you think is the difference between a pre-print and the published version? Let me tell you - it's zero difference except for the page number is added.

Yeah, this is not necessarily true. I've had papers change dramatically (and in a positive way) due to reviewer comments.

In my experience, the version authors are allowed to share is after peer review but before copy editing. Idk if that is technically preprint, but it's the version I put on arXiv.

In my field, journals get pretty touchy about that.

In my (sub)field, this is not generally true. It's not generally the case that final conference papers are the same as the ones put on arXiv six months before.

Depends on what you mean by "pre-print". If you mean a copy of the paper before reviewing, etc., then there's a considerable difference.

On the other hand, all of the instances I'm aware of, the authors can send out copies of the paper after reviewing changes; i.e. the same content that will be (or was) published. It may or may not have the same formatting, but it's the same text.

In general, yes. And even if it's not, people (read: academics) almost universally don't really care and will send you their paper anyways. The main thing is sometimes getting more well-known professors to reply which is a whole other topic, but most will still be happy to share their paper.

Re: your latter case, yes. I suspect that automating this process will likely lead to worse consequences (sharing papers via email is something that everyone-knows-that-everyone-does kinda thing, even if it may not be "fully legal"—whatever that means), but setting up infrastructure to share your papers (even with approval) is likely to be met with some amount of resistance and probably not-greatly-worded letters from publishers.

To be fair, a good chunk of useful publishers (not all... I'm looking at you, Cell) are moving to allow reviewed articles on authors' websites, but almost all journals allow preprints to be available on open sites (and be submitted for review).

Each journal is different in what they allow to be shared. There are primarily three "versions" of the paper:

1. Pre-review, pre-print: i.e. the journal had no part in the paper up to this point

2. Post-print: Changes have been made to satisfy the reviewers' comments. Contains all the final content that will be published

3. Publisher's version: The publisher has done copy-editing (layout changes), and probably adjusted it to fit whatever style their journal is.

You can check the rules for most publications here: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php

I actually replied to the author when she originally posted this a few weeks back asking about this. I’d be curious what the actual legal rights are. It would seem there might be some kind of loophole in this where it’s easy to set up a service that acts on behalf of authors as an agent vending out the papers to whoever wants them. And then of course that seems easily automatable. So essentially you just wind up with an open hosting site for all papers that authors. They just need to upload them and grant permission to perform the service or something like that. (Didn’t get a response though.)

Generally what you're looking for is "research reports" of the team. These are the original versions of the published papers, before details have been cut out to fit a page limit.

If you're into brevity, you can also search for PhD theses of one of the co-authors within a similar time period as the interesting article. I believe in vast majority of papers the footwork is done by a PhD student, that will then incorporate the thing into a thesis.

If all else fails, email the authors.

Most author publishing agreements allow stipulate this. In my experience, the author retains copyright, but grants a license to distribute the typeset, proofread document. You generally have the right to distribute an un-typeset copy on your own website, and on platforms (arXiv), sometimes after an embargo period (6 months to 2 years). I think personal communication attachments are not really considered distribution, so I have not seen the published/preprint version stipulated either way.

It's not strictly true, but generally, authors are allowed to send the published article, and I've never heard of someone getting in trouble for doing so even in cases where it wasn't allowed.

My wife is applying for a PhD and has simply asked professors for a copy of their paper. Nearly all of them have happily obliged.

The submission requirements explicitly require authors to not make any papers they submit available elsewhere.

I don't think that's normally true. Do you have an example of a journal with such a policy?

You might be mistakenly thinking of the requirement not to submit the same paper concurrently to other journals. For example, ACM's policy: https://www.acm.org/publications/policies/author-representat...

And from ACM's "Author Rights" page: "Authors can post the accepted, peer-reviewed version prepared by the author [...] On Author's own Home Page" https://authors.acm.org/main.html

It's not common anymore fortunately, but as recently as five years ago most biology journals were very preprint unfriendly and considered trying to publish a work already on a preprint server as a scam similar to republishing a journal article. Things are finally trying turning around, although preprints in biology are still very rare as opposed to those in CS or physics.

A shout out to biorxiv.org for doing a great job there!

Is that with other publications, or any availability at all? It would seem that others think that one off copies are acceptable.

They tend to require they not be sent elsewhere for publication. That usually doesn't include archiving them on the lab's website, sending via email, etc. They're just not interested in double-publishing.

Nature explicity states the opposite for its group of publications. You can post your papers on your website, on arXiv, wherever you want.

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