Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you.
This is also a deliciously fun debate, because it calls into question our most fundamental assumptions about the idea of "illegal." For example, is Reddit facilitating illegal activity due to that subreddit? Should anything be done about it? Is Reddit responsible for the actions of this subreddit, or are the users themselves responsible? If the users are responsible, should Reddit be forced to cooperate with law enforcement to penalize those people? What legal penalties, if any, should be inflicted on the users?
You can say that it's illegal and shouldn't be done, but what's fascinating to me is that when you try to think of any specific action to be taken, it's quite difficult to come up with anything reasonable.
That seems dubious, because it's circumventing the fee that most people have to pay. If everyone used that subreddit rather than pay the fee, the market value of the article would drop to zero. Surely that counts as harm in the eyes of the law?
To be clear, I personally believe that fees for academic articles have a terrible chilling effect and should be abolished. It creates a situation where only an elite few have access to research that might otherwise be the decisive factor in, say, a debate about public policy, or whether someone is able to develop a certain algorithm, or help people in general. I'm only pointing out that it's fun to try to debate what should be done about this "illegal activity."
This is the single best tip I've read about anything in the past six months[1]. Here's why:
In 2012, I graduated from dental school in debt up to my EYEBALLS[2], and look, I can NOT afford the per article fee required for me to form my own opinions on important dental topics like implantology, oral surgery, adhesive bonding, high strength porcelains. I've had to rely on reading literally tens of thousands of forum posts[3] by dentists to sort out the totally-wrong from the quite-valuable information, to see if the "thought-leaders" (the well-known dentists who are paid to write articles) are supported by fact.
I sent a letter to the dean of my dental school about being able to read primary lit articles like I could in school, here's a quote from the letter: "As you are undoubtedly aware, one of the School’s objectives in its mission statement is a devotion of “time and resources to the discovery and dissemination of new knowledge.” Considering this goal, it is frustrating for the School of Dentistry to espouse the value of scientific research yet deny alumni access to the primary literature." I received a very polite non-answer and no action in the two years since I sent it. Ef that.
I did, however, receive a letter asking me to donate $1,250 to the School on the occasion of their 125th anniversary. That made me just a little bit upset.
So, sillysaurus3, you finally gave me the tools to round out my collection of dental primary literature articles in Pages 2.7.3 (per the second footnote of this post, you will note that I can not afford to upgrade to Papers 3). Because of your post, I can become a better dentist, faster, with fewer errors.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
[1] And I became a father four months ago.
[2] Seriously, my student loan payments are 2.7x my house payment. 35% of my after tax income is student loan payments. It's... sad.
[3] DentalTown.com ... the good, the bad, and the ugly in dentistry. Just don't go on their political forums. Good God, what a bunch of fools.
I worked with a fantastic implantology startup (http://bioimplant.at) up until a few months ago, and it was illuminating to discover just how much of the implant industry is a racket.
Most surprising of all was the casual ignorance of the majority of 'dentists'/'implantologists' on the DentalTown implants forum. I'd certainly never want any of them in the vicinity of my mouth.
As for these institutions trumpeting their devotion to the 'dissemination of new knowledge', get in touch with Dr Pirker at BioImplant, and ask for his point of view on the subject...
> I did, however, receive a letter asking me to donate $1,250 to the School on the occasion of their 125th anniversary. That made me just a little bit upset.
I so hope you replied enclosing your previous correspondence as your reason to decline.
No way is it fair use since they are doing entire articles.
Reddit will get DCMA safe harbor protection as long as they aren't aware of the specifics.
The users requesting and providing the papers are probably infringing copyright.
Not that I blame them. I'm an IP attorney and I think the pricing and availability of articles to those outside of academia is total shit. I was trying to do some prior art research and it is essentially impossible without academic access.
I ended up going to the Library of Congress and do the research there.
That's just one piece to "fair use". In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
* the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
* the nature of the copyrighted work;
* the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
* the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
It doesn't have to pass all those tests but it likely will need to pass more than just one of them.
Fair Use is an affirmative defense. That is: it's not a right to use copyrighted works, but, in the event infringement is alleged, it may be invoked as a defense.
Specifically the language of US statute is "the factors to be considered shall include". Which can be read as also allowing other considerations. Though I don't know offhand of specific legal gloss or caselaw demonstrating otherwise. The Wikipedia article you cite has that specific claim flagged as "citation required" at this time.
It can be, but it being educational certainly doesn't make it fair use. If this was the case, no text book, teacher's curriculum book or documentary could be copyrighted. I doubt publishers who work in the education realm would be happy with this (and I'm not just talking about cartel level college text books here, but Kindergarten curriculum all the way on up).
This has been litigated in a number of "copy shop" cases (the most important involving UT and Elsiver if I'm not mistaken, but I can't look it up just now) and this is almost certainly not fair use.
Circumventing the fee is in no way fair to the corporation trying to charge the fee, especially when the corporation expressly wants to force each of those people to pay the fee. I can't rip off a book for my personal education. Same with an academic article.
No matter how much we wish the world was different, that's how the law is currently set up.
Bad example... people can and do buy books, and let anyone who comes over to their place read them. They even let complete strangers take the books home for a short time, you just have to fill out a form to get a card from them first.
The fact that digital copies are rather easier to loan out, and the fact that you don't much care if you get the copy back, shouldn't make /r/scholar illegal. It might, but it shouldn't.
Without going this far, I personally think civil disobedience is ok in that case. How can you change the law, if the law is absolute? (I've noticed that this is a rather controversial opinion though.)
> Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you.
>Little trick: You can access every can't-access article by posting it to http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar and waiting a couple hours for someone with subscription access to go fetch it for you.
Thanks for the link. This resource has saved my hide more than once during my time as a university student.
Also, to anyone with access to scientific literature: We welcome you to "pay it forward" and fulfill some requests on <a href="https://reddit.com/r/scholar>/r/scholar</a> yourself.
This is also a deliciously fun debate, because it calls into question our most fundamental assumptions about the idea of "illegal." For example, is Reddit facilitating illegal activity due to that subreddit? Should anything be done about it? Is Reddit responsible for the actions of this subreddit, or are the users themselves responsible? If the users are responsible, should Reddit be forced to cooperate with law enforcement to penalize those people? What legal penalties, if any, should be inflicted on the users?
You can say that it's illegal and shouldn't be done, but what's fascinating to me is that when you try to think of any specific action to be taken, it's quite difficult to come up with anything reasonable.
The subreddit tries to argue that it's fair use: https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/fair_use.html
That seems dubious, because it's circumventing the fee that most people have to pay. If everyone used that subreddit rather than pay the fee, the market value of the article would drop to zero. Surely that counts as harm in the eyes of the law?
To be clear, I personally believe that fees for academic articles have a terrible chilling effect and should be abolished. It creates a situation where only an elite few have access to research that might otherwise be the decisive factor in, say, a debate about public policy, or whether someone is able to develop a certain algorithm, or help people in general. I'm only pointing out that it's fun to try to debate what should be done about this "illegal activity."