Reading Paywalled Studies For Free

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.

See that green lock on the side of the screen that I have so generously made a red arrow towards in Microsoft Paint? I click on that and it gives me the full study.

It goes to this URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-020-0760-6_reference.pdf

So you can get the full study with just one click. This works around 75% of the time. The other 25% of the time I have to copy and paste the DOI into Scihub, and get the papers that way. Scihub was started by Alexandra Elbakyan, who is a Kazakhstani computer programmer fighting this paywall fight as well. You will see a gif of her waving at the authorities in the bottom left of any Scihub page right now. That's her little "fuck you" to the people trying to take her down. She also thinks scientific information should be free to read by anyone. Since she is not in the US, they can't kill her like Aaron Swartz. She is under investigation by the DOJ, though. Read into her history to get an idea of the situation. This is all part of the larger Open Access movement, which is fighting to allow everyone access to scientific studies and research. It's human knowledge. It's our knowledge! Nobody owns it but the public as a whole. So everyone here should be aware of the tools that are available, and of the Open Access movement in general. Happy reading!