I would and I urge everyone to do so too.
History will look back on this period and see which side of the line people stood on.
#LiberateIdeas
From your comment, it looks like you have zero skin in the game here. Given that your comment is unproductive.
Pretending research doesn’t exist slows progress and it is anti-science to put your head in the sand because you don’t agree with the location that knowledge was published in.
If you did read the papers in journals you don’t agree with, built on their ideas and didn’t cite them, then you just committed plagiarism and obscured the scientific record.
The “link to the PDF of the author’s homepage” trick doesn’t work because eventually that page will go away, as we have seen over and over in the age of the web. Part of the value journals add is promising to archive the work _forever_. They don’t promise it will be free forever (or at all) - which is what needs to change.
The answer isn’t to “not cite”, but to not publish there in the first place. That takes systemic change. Change of both the incentives: “how do I get promomoted?” or, fundamentally: “how do I make an impact and measure it?”. Citations are the de facto standard right now. It will change when we can measure impact (and get more promotions, grants, etc.) in a way that doesn’t favor the richest journals getting richer.
My only regret is going soft after that. I should have made 100% of my citations include the SciHub url.
It doesn’t seem worth it to have to fight and lose during proofing over what amounts to a DOI anyways
Pretty much everything is prohibitively expensive when it comes to Elzevier and Springer, or so it seems. But that's enough reason to avoid them altogether as publishers, open access or not.
fwiw - I'm also not sure why IEEE and ACM get a free pass either.
researchgate.net & arxiv provide a away around this. Arxiv is well known, not sure how researchgate is doing. Scientists could setup their profiles and papers in arxiv or researchgate and then they can be accessed over google scholar.
Arxiv, research gate, scihub— they all seem to work well together with the commercial publishing system.
I think the world without a lot of money going into scientific publishing would be worse off.
Which they are when a paper is published Open Access. They are covered once, which is ok, because the publication costs also occur once for the most part. There is no reason for a publisher to be allowed to perpetually charge ~40$ for a pdf download.
One other often mentioned criticism is that universities are forced to subscribe to bundles of journals with a mixture of desired journals fudged with journals no one would want to read. Nominally the subscription fee covers a large swath of journals and papers, but essentially the actual value is much more narrow.
To be honest there is no need for journals anyway in our completely digitized world. If all the papers were published Open Access (paid for once) the users could simply filter for the keywords relevant to them. Why would I subscribe to a Journal? This is technology from the last century.
Edit: typo
I’m not sure how we get away from the current review system without a coordinated effort involving the prominent scholars in whatever field. The editors are often senior peers, and there’s sort of an expectation that you review others work, and that they will review your work