Hacker News Reader

Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

My PhD research was funded by public money. The work was nothing special (that's putting it mildly), and it was a couple of decades ago, but thanks to it I ended up as a co-author on two peer-reviewed papers. It seems beyond crazy that there appears to be no legitimate way for me to share my work with others.

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.

View on HN

The (accepted and legal) "norm" these days is to post an author pre-print in an institutional open-access repository - check out "green open access" (versus gold open access).

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.

Yes - for my doctorate, I wrote several papers, and as a condition of my (public & private) funding they had to be made available publicly.

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)

> they had to be made available publicly.

Might seem pedantic but it's important to be precise: presumably you mean freely available? Publishing makes something publicly available by definition.

Good point - yes freely available to all.

This is the "norm" in STEM fields, but not so much in the humanities yet, and I would suspect that some for-profit journals would reject publication of your article if they knew you were already providing a pre-print and so wouldn’t really be respecting the post-publication embargo.

I think you are allowed to distribute pdf copies of your published work on a personal website, even if they appear in a paywalled journal

> pdf copies of your published work

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...

A good point actually - from a legal perspective this is tricky. Generally the publisher claims copyright over the arrangement that is "published". Photocopying the printed version would therefore be problematic.

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.

Can’t you export it to PDF with whatever software you used write the paper?

It might not be pixel-perfect like a photocopy, but the words should all be there.

This might misunderstand how science authorship works.

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".

Actually, this depends on the terms defined by each particular journal or conference to which the work is submitted. While things have gotten better in recent years, traditionally even distribution on personal websites is technically not allowed, just selectively enforced, again depending on the venue and even the exposure of the particular work or lab group.

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.

Also depends on your jurisdiction. In the Netherlands, researchers are allowed to make their own works available to anyone six months after publication, regardless of their publisher's terms: https://www.openaccess.nl/en/in-the-netherlands/you-share-we...

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.

> all they have to do is give it to a university library

Give what? Their permission? The source document (pre-print) that went to the journal? The PDF of the published article?

The poster [1] refers to "the published version", so yes, the PDF of the published article. But Dutch researchers who are interested can probably best just get in touch with their library, who I'm sure will be able to tell them exactly what they need.

[1] https://www.openaccess.nl/sites/www.openaccess.nl/files/docu...

> "the published version", so yes, the PDF of the published article

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.

Unfortunately I'm not a researcher, but hopefully someone who is will try/has tried it out and can report back :)

> researchers sometimes resort to hosting a draft of their manuscript, and not the final camera ready version.

and this is fine for most people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com