Comment · Fri, August 14, 2020 · Natrium Health & Nootropics Depot
Reading Paywalled Studies For Free
Original post in this thread
MisterYouAreSoDumb · 103 points
So I figured I would make a post about this, because fuck putting scientific knowledge behind paywalls! Human knowledge should never be hidden and forced to be paid for to be seen. Our tax dollars fund a lot of this research anyway, and they want us to pay to read it? Go fuck yourselves! Humanity will only advance if we allow open access to scientific knowledge. One of the founders of Reddit, Aaron Swartz, was literally driven to suicide by the system for trying to allow open access to scientific knowledge. That or he was actually killed for it. Look it up. It's totally fucked up what they did to him for trying to give the general public access to scientific information that their own tax dollars paid for! A disgusting display of what the United States has become...
So what you all should do here is to go download the plugin Unpaywall. I have it for Firefox. Once you do that, it recognizes if you are on a scientific paper, and puts a little lock in the right side of your screen. If the lock is green, you can click it and get the full study.
Take this study for example: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32688366/
[This is what I see when I am on that page.](https://imgur.com/a/PNA…
What they were answering
Smokrates · 4 points
Btw sci-hub also has a one click plugin and you always break copyright laws when viewing information you would normally need to pay for.
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · Natrium Health & Nootropics Depot
Incorrect. Reading a study falls under fair use. Copyright can’t restrict the facts and information learned during research. It can only restrict access to the papers themselves. Personal research falls under fair use, as do a number of other situations. The issue of copyright mostly arises from reproducing or distributing that research. If there is a publicly accessible URL with a research study, you are completely allowed to read it. That does not violate any copyright laws.