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Comment by WilTimSon | Hacker News Reader

Sci-Hub is such a marvelous resource. I like to read research papers for fun sometimes but I'm, let's put it gently, no scientist. So it'd be a huge waste of money for me to pay the steep prices of scientific journal subscriptions just to read 1-2 articles per month where I understand at most 75% of it.

However, I still feel bad about accessing them without any benefit to the scientific teams. Is there any way to give back to the people whose work I'm reading or at least some kind of science-related general fund or charity that I could contribute to?

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Scientists don’t get paid anything regardless of whether or not you pay a subscription/article fee to the science journals. The best thing to do to benefit scientists (usually) is to spread awareness of their work, as that is the main currency in academia that determines career advancement and future fundraising. Ideally you’re promoting it to other academics (so that they generate trackable citations), but general publicity also helps.

If you enjoy a paper you read, email the first or corresponding author and say so! It would make my day if this happened to me, a PhD student.

Giving back doesn't have to be monetary. A note like that could give someone the encouragement they need to finish an experiment or a draft.

This.

Paying taxes is (at least in western countries where i know a tiny bit about academia) sufficient to support the authors.

If you want to go beyond that: reach out / blog / tweet / etc about papers that peek your interest. If someone else wrote about a paper of mine, I'd be over the moon!

Those teams receive nothing from publishing either, other than CV credit and occasionally, a copy of the journal. Many of them put their pre-prints on academia.edu and often will email it to you if you ask.

It's complicated, but places like Wiley and Elsevier take much more than they give.

Just pay your taxes. I would also say "vote for politicians who make science funding a 1st class issue" but I don't know any.

But we do know who moved to and did reduce the funding on different levels in recent times.

It’s not an answer to your question, but when you pay JSTOR or whomever, none of that goes back to the scientists. It’s not like royalties for an author.

I don’t know if that makes you feel any better?

Yes, don't feel bad, we'd never see it anyway. I agree with the proposals of the others, rather write an email to the corresponding author or a blog post about it.

Do not feel bad. You are the benefit. More precisely, your education is. We should try to maximize people's potential and share knowledge with everyone, who wants to learn, instead of hiding it behind paywalls.

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