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Comment by sometimeshuman | Hacker News Reader

"Most journals already allow authors to distribute copies by request." Does anyone know how this works in practice ? I'd like to ask a few of my favorite researchers for a copy of their papers but I am a hobbyist and don't want to take their time and add to their likely overflowing inbox.

BTW, "this is nuts" isn't a claim you can make if you don't know the answer to questions you posted.

From their website: "an article is submitted and is assessed by our editors. If suitable it will be put through Peer Review". That peer review process could quickly exceed the $11.4k for example.

[edited] added the BTW paragraphs after responses were received to the question in my first paragraph.

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As a hobbyist, I just email the author, thank them for their work, maybe ask a question about or comment on their work and ask if they have the specific paper I can't get. Nobody's ever said no and I've asked dozens if times in CS, linguistics and for some climate and geography stuff. Academics are pretty accessible and even willing to chat about their work as long as you're not a crank.

I was super surprised the first time I emailed a researcher and asked them a question about their work while mentioning I didn't have access to their paper. A week later an envelope arrived at my office with the paper in it. This was last millennium.

This works in almost any field. Researchers generally love to hear from people, will usually answer whatever questions you might have about their work, and will happily give you a copy for free

As a researcher, someone writing me to say they're interested in my work and would like a copy of my paper will:

1) Result in a PDF attachment with a short note.

2) Probably be the highlight of my day.

Sure, in most cases, you can ask authors for a copy of their paper.

However, that's not a reasonable way to distribute science. Most research requires you to skim through many different articles, so introducing a latency of a few hours/days each time you want to open an article makes the process unreasonable.

See also: Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

For a sample size of one, go ahead and ask them:

https://twitter.com/hwitteman/status/1015049411276300289

how ironic that her blog post on how to access paywalled articles is currently "Access Denied"

https://holly.witteman.ca/index.php/2017/12/11/getting-acces...

The path has changed (link rot) but the article is still searchable and viewable: https://holly.witteman.ca/getting-access-to-paywalled-papers...

I sent her an email about it. I hope she can fix it. :)

Peer reviewers are all volunteers, the journal only pays the staff that coordinate the reviews- email a bunch of people and ask if they'll do a review (and often that's semi-automated now), and the editor that makes the decision after looking briefly at the feedback from the reviewers. The editors don't actually even do any proofreading or anything like that anymore, they just make executive decisions as to what articles to accept.

This is your experience with nature neuroscience? I doubt it

Find their email address, write them, and ask. They're more likely than most people realize to respond.

Hahahahaha. I'm sorry, but that was a pretty incredible claim. The journals sure as hell aren't paying for peer review, or at least nobody I know has gotten paid for it. Peer review is basically a gratis service done by other researchers in the same field.

Agree with the others - find the email address and ask. Especially if the lead author is a student / post doc, they are usually very excited to help. Profs often have an overflowing inbox and might be more hit or miss.

Just send contact author a request for a reprint. This has been standard operating procedure for hundreds of years—the only new angle, the ubiquitous and annoying PDF format.

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