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Comment by xefer | Hacker News Reader

I've had over 100% luck emailing papers' authors directly asking for a copy of a particular paper I've been interested in reading. I typically get a PDF emailed back to me.

I say "over 100%" because several times I've had hard copies sent for whatever reason with hand-written letters thanking me for expressing interest in their research and letting me know they'd be happy to answer any questions, etc.

I've generally found that some researchers, especially in relatively arcane areas are very pleased to find people who are genuinely interested in their work.

I only appeal to authors directly if I'm unable to access a paper online through my library's JSTOR access which is fairly extensive.

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That's great, but it is not the universal experience (at a minimum, many past authors are now dead). And of course many scientists need to read a lot of papers. Having to go through the rigmarole of emailing authors, waiting for a response, is a pointless waste of everybody's time. #icanhazpdf is valuable because it's usually very fast. Sci-Hub and libgen are even more valuable because they are even faster and allow search+discovery without waiting for a third person to act.

When you publish get generally get sent a stack of hard copies for distribution to whoever you feel like sending to (usually far more than you have people to send to). Sending the reprints is legal. Sending the pdf is either illegal or legal or more likely a huge grey area which as an author you can't be bothered to work out. Postage is free in most academic departments and not much harder than sending an email. Therefore many would send the hard copy...

Several professors I know publish all their papers on their university/government lab hosted website and have never received any take down notices. When you use Google scholar to search for one of their papers there is a link directly to the pdf hosted by them. Many professors feel that the papers are theirs to redistribute as they wish even if copyright says otherwise. But I do understand why some authors might feel wary of this.

It depends on the publisher copyright agreement. With many closed journals, the researcher is free to post a preprint on a personal site or to something like arXiv, but not to post the final version with the journal's "value-added" layout and such.

This is common in computer science and related fields (licensing agreements be damned), but much less so in others.

I think that that certain US government grant money prevents full copyright assignment. These professors are probably fully within their rights to self host copies of their work. This is why I said sometimes legal and sometimes a grey area..

Really? I've published a bunch of papers and only ever got one hard copy - and that was one copy of the journal, no additional copies to share.

I guess it depends upon the journal.

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