The quote from Max Bruce, the City of London Police's cyber protection officer that "Sci-Hub will then use [stolen credentials] to compromise your university's computer network in order to steal research papers" shows some fairly serious misunderstandings of how scientific research is funded, carried out, written up, shared, and published ... and which multinationals get rich from selling access to the very last bit.
It's not ideal though, but search engines like Google Scholar are good at finding the open-access versions of paywalled academic works and linking to the PDF of them.
What I found was that the actual _content_ is served by the university - free for all etc, but any typsetting, editing and formatting became the publisher's property. Yeah sounds daft, but, well, you can get all my papers either directly from the university (via a centralised UK catalogue that Google has managed to link quite nicely) or pay £20+ a shot to Elsevier for the same thing. (Maybe it's different? Looks better? A nicer font? I honestly don't know, but I'm pretty sure the results and stuff are identical, would be quite funny if they weren't)
Might seem pedantic but it's important to be precise: presumably you mean freely available? Publishing makes something publicly available by definition.
Not wishing to sound facetious, but where would I get the PDFs, other than from - say - SciHub?
I have the original bound journal for one of them, but you can bet your bottom dollar it would be illegal for me to start making photocopies of my work and handing them out...
It might not be pixel-perfect like a photocopy, but the words should all be there.
I was once congratulated for publishing a paper I had no idea existed, after I gave someone permission to use my research work in exchange for credit.
It took me some effort to view a copy of what I had "written".
With digital formats, the general approach is to export a PDF from LaTeX (or whatever is used to write the paper) as an author pre-print copy (i.e. not in the final form used by the journal), and publish that one. From a technical legal perspective you would likely need to look at what agreement you signed with the publisher at the time (if any), since that may restrict distribution of the text.
This raises a good point though for works that were pre-open access, and the risk of them "rotting" behind paywalls out of being in a state of legal limbo. Newer science will be more accessible due to open access rules, but older science may end up effectively "lost" to those without access to these paywalled repositories.
There's no real incentive for those publishers to open things up, as they rely on institutions paying large subscriptions to preserve access to the legacy archived content, and that keeps their many thousands of staff employed.
When enforcement is more strict, researchers sometimes resort to hosting a draft of their manuscript, and not the final camera ready version.
Unfortunately, in many fields open access or even just personal hosting and is still uncommon, and the vast majority of papers remain behind paywalls.
Of course, it's not perfect since it still requires work on the part of the author, but all they have to do is give it to a university library and they'll make sure it's available as soon as it's allowed.
Give what? Their permission? The source document (pre-print) that went to the journal? The PDF of the published article?
[1] https://www.openaccess.nl/sites/www.openaccess.nl/files/docu...
I'm genuinely interested in how this works in practice. Also how do authors obtain a PDF of their published work other than from the publisher?
Would be great to hear from Dutch researchers (particularly those publishing in Elsevier journals...) on how well this procedure is working.
and this is fine for most people.
(I'm not connected with Nature).
They call it "open access" if I remember correctly and it's a couple of times more expensive than it already is.
Universities pay a lot of money to publish in these journals.
https://www.nature.com/nature-research/editorial-policies/se...
"Preprints
Nature Portfolio journals encourage posting of preprints of primary research manuscripts on preprint servers, authors’ or institutional websites, and open communications between researchers whether on community preprint servers or preprint commenting platforms. Preprints are defined as an author’s version of a research manuscript prior to formal peer review at a journal, which is deposited on a public server (as described in Preprints for the life sciences. Science 352, 899–901; 2016); preprints may be posted at any time during the peer review process. Posting of preprints is not considered prior publication and will not jeopardize consideration at Nature Portfolio journals. Manuscripts posted on preprint servers will not be taken into account when determining the advance provided by a study under consideration at a Nature Portfolio journal."
The end result is that the vast majority (i.e. almost all) such research (regardless of how funded) is public and accessible on the institution's repository, or otherwise deposited with an open access library, such that it can "count" towards the metrics.
A clever approach if you ask me - find what matters to the individuals concerned (the metrics), and discount work from those metrics unless made freely available within X days, with appropriate audit trail to match.
Why?