Hacker News Reader

Comment by impendia | Hacker News Reader

I can only assume that they are not allowed to, due to copyright imposed by the journals.

This is probably true. Whenever I have published articles (I am a mathematician), I have been asked to sign some long agreement which I only skimmed. We have some rights to publish and distribute our work... but not unlimited... something complicated...

In practice, I just put copies of all of my papers on my website where anyone can download them. I have many colleagues who do the same, and many colleagues who are more scrupulous about following the journals' rules. In any case, I don't know of any scholars who have gotten into trouble for distributing their own work.

View on HN

I work for a university computing service and we sometimes have to deal with copyright takedown demands from academic publishers aimed at the websites of the authors of the papers. It's a disgraceful situation.

What's the advantage over just using the arxiv? A bit better typesetting?

Credibility. Reading a mathematical paper takes a huge amount of effort, and people won't go through that unless there is a high chance to believe the paper is good/correct. Usually this is determined by 1) The author is famous 2) The journal is respected.

This is the same basic problem self-published novels face. There are probably some very good self-published novels, but without someone whose opinion I should trust verifying that they're good, I'm unlikely to a) find out about them and b) if I do find out, read them and decide for myself.

A lot of novels that I turn out to like enormously don't have first chapters that immediately speak to their greatness. But most of the novels I read, I read because an interesting review caught my attention, I've read the writer before, or the book has been recommended by someone who I trust. The first two in my preceding list roughly map to author fame and journal respect.

The ArXiv includes a link to the actual (usually gated) journal article. And the text of that link is the journal name and citation.

My question isn't "why do people submit to journals?" it's "why post the actual PDF from the journal on your webpage (thereby taking a slight risk of getting in trouble) rather than just linking to the ArXiv version?".

Ah, sorry I misunderstood your question.

To answer your actual question, I personally do it because I almost wish the journals would do something nasty to me. Then, I would tell everyone I meet at every conference about that for the next few years and would hasten the decline of the current status-quo.

The arxiv is not refereed. I usually read those pre-prints with (extra) extra caution, especially if they are outside my area of competence.

You should read all legal contracts you enter into. Remember that you can edit a contract, strike out parts, etc. You should get the other party to sign off on it aswell. You could edit the contract to allow you to put your paper on your website. Problem solved.

The problem is you won't get the other party to sign it off.

Yes, you need the other person to agree to the changes. So you send it back to them and ask them to sign it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com