Imagine living in a world where it has to be explicitly said that you are allowed to send someone a free copy of something you wrote.

People shouldn't have to email you. Put your papers on arxiv.org or your own web site.

Just so we’re clear, it’s not obvious nor is the general public misunderstanding anything. There are not a lot of situations like that with basically any other thing that has been monetized. I am a filmmaker. Even if I directed, produced, and starred in the film, I cannot necessarily send you a copy for free even if I want to (legally). There are other parties involved that restrict what I can and can’t do with the product, typically film festivals until the festival circuit is done and then distributors.

This is very common and most people just kind of assume It to be the case with academic journals.

Scientist here. I encourage everyone to use a shadow library like Scihub to break the stranglehold that Elsevier and Wiley have on the free availability of knowledge. These are financialized corporations that add nothing to society and leach off of scientists' hard work.

I work as a non-academic at a research university.

Let me tell you, academics love discussing and sharing every phase of their papers, especially the findings and subsequent theories or discoveries. I get to participate in research activities quite frequently and some of it is so fascinating. They love someone showing interest and love sharing on their knowledge and findings. There's a couple I'll be waiting months more to hear conclusions on, but it's that "so cool if true" stuff. I can't imagine the anticipation of those involved, but even if they hit a wall, they explain they're still just as excited to know they've closed the door on something and may open the door to something else.

It seems like such rewarding work.

There's also a stigma around journals the older and more experienced academics get. I won't get into it, but yeah, all good things are open to exploitation and often the younger ones are held under wings to guide them on the right path for quicker career growth. That's just how it eventually works with humans for any thing that's meant to be of best intentions.

But most people are good people and their passion is untameable, so all you need is just ask them to share knowledge—they absolutely will. The vast majority are certainly not in it for the money, not unless it can get them more financing for more research lol.

That 'just email us' is a significant piece of friction in the way of scientific freedom of enquiry. Look to arxiv or equivalents...

Scihub ftw! 🏴‍☠️

Honestly I’ve heard this and seen it written very many times, but any time I’ve ever reached out to a lead author to request access to their paper I’ve been met with zero reply. Like, nothing, from at least six different attempts (that I can remember right now). And I’m a government employee emailing from a government domain, usually with a very well written plea for information. Maybe I’m the unlucky one?

When I went to university, our lecturer would literally pass around a flash drive with the ridiculously overpriced textbook he was the author of. He was a cool guy who had the extremely valuable skill of turning a dull subject interesting.

What I don't understand, and maybe somebody can explain. If this is the case, why wouldn't there be torrents of every paper whose authors would be genuinely delighted to share?

Not being skeptical here. I'm really curious.

And maybe there are, and they're just not well advertised for understandable reasons?

Yes, this is how I made it through grad school lol. Wish I knew as an undergrad, but that's fine.

Until now I could get by with Scihub and Arxiv for college and personal hyperfixation research, but I'd actually love to ask an author directly some time if I ever run into a paper where that's necessary.

Ive had mixed results with this, but one author was really excited (as was i) and we had a good back and forth for a bit after i had a chance to read/digest the paper.

By the way, in almost 100% of cases (the rest being just OA where the published version could be sent by anyone to anyone or something legally really dubious), the authors have a right to send their paper, even if it is published in a paywalled journal. Basically, the only thing the journal has a right to for subscription-based (aka those that cost $35) articles is content plus page layout. If the authors have the exact same text but formatted differently, they are free to distribute it wherever and however they want.

Preprint servers or lab/personal websites are best first choices for that.

edit: a small disclaimer on the exact same text meaning exact same text the authors provided; if the editor in the journal has corrected some typos and inserted a/the here or there (a common thing for non-natives to miss), then this becomes more of a grey area, because technically at this point it’s not a 100% authors’ text).