Language yearning

me: i lo-

Den Brunnen (erst) zudecken, wenn das Kind (schon) hineingefallen / ertrunken ist.

So lets say you’re researching something for a paper (or just for fun) and the research paper you want to read is behind a paywall, or the site makes you create an account first, or makes you pay to download, or limits you to only 5 free articles, or otherwise makes it difficult for you to read what you want.

do not fear! copy the link to the article

go to sci-hub.se         (the url is always changing so its best to check out whereisscihub.now.sh to find what the current url is)

slap the article link in there

to be super-clear because a surprising number of people don’t know this: academics do NOT make ANY money from journal articles, in fact they often have paid money to get them published (out of their research grants, not personal money) as well as reviewing and editing other researchers’ articles, for free. they sometimes get royalties for books but…very very small amounts, despite the fact that the books are $$$$$. 

the system is rigged to fuck in favor of the publishers. right now it’s not enough that you publish. if you want to move forward in your career you have to publish in certain prestigious journals (journal rankings are at best a dubious practice) and you have to publish open-access. which is great and something i totally agree should be the norm in academic publications, everyone should have access to knowledge……………………………..if we didn’t have to pay thousands of dollars to get an article published open-access. which, if you’re not tenured and don’t currently have a grant (spoilers: this happens a lot) you can’t afford to do. if i was getting paid even modest royalties per article download i’d have at least some safety-net income, and then i’d be like hey please don’t steal my articles, i might need that $15 to buy groceries next week. but i don’t.

journal publishers also push prohibitive prices when negotiating with universities for access through library services for students and researchers, so that poorer universities often can’t afford this. if not for things like sci-hub, researchers from these universities wouldn’t have equal access to knowledge as those from richer universities and couldn’t advance their work at a similar pace, their universities would have poorer results and more limited access to funding, and so on. vicious circle created and maintained by the publishers.

Me: