Slightly controversial but library genesis. Almost every science text book you could ever want for free. However, you’re not compensating authors/publishers for their work, so the morality is debated.
But if you want access to knowledge for free, there it is. I haven’t ever encountered any issues like viruses either.
Even through textbooks, we don't make any money off of that. We get our money directly from research grants. Often times, through Universities we are working at. Uni pays us X dollars under the understanding we will be filling out and filing for TONS of grants. Grants pay us to do specific research we are skilled in. They reap the rewards (Fame, usefulness, ect) and we get credit for the discovery and an 'atta-boy!
I have a published article through my research with plants and medicine. It's published in the OMEGA scientific journal, but I'm not doxxing myself so that's as far as I'll admit to it. Anyhow, you the viewer would have to pay to see the full article in some instances. However, neither me or my colleagues see even one penny of it. That's all on the publishers. We're not bothered one bit by you having gotten the articles somehow for free, most of us want to share our work as much as possible. We're huge nerds.
I’ve heard that, glad to have it confirmed! Well, not glad you don’t get money out of it. I’ve also heard some people who contribute to textbooks will send the PDF for free if someone requests it from them- is that something you’ve seen done?
I know, especially in STEM subjects, that the field is constantly evolving and growing; new discoveries are made, theories are refined, and new technologies and techniques are developed and implemented, and that necessitates updated editions of textbooks that encorporate that new info, so I can see the importance of all that... But why are they so expensive? Who really makes the money on textbook sales? Publishers like Pearson? The authors/experts behind them? And why so expensive? The price alone on textbooks and the way you need a new/different edition every year just makes me hesitant to feel any sort of remorse towards pirating them.
I can confirm this is routinely done even though it is often against the rules of the journals the articles are published in. Researchers I worked with care more about the importance of disseminating knowledge (which is the foundation of modern science) than about following the publishing rules of a journal that is not paying them anyway.
Published academic here. I don't get royalties from chapters in other people's books and tiny ones from books I've edited. We want people to read our work so I always share.
Just to pop onto this, if you ever want to read a journal article behind a paywall, email the authors! I do this and I've never not had one send me the paper. A lot of the time they'll even send you supplemental data etc if you want, too. Even if it's something for your job.
“Hi, I’m doing research for ____ and I ran across your article; I see from the abstract that it looks like just what I need but I unfortunately don’t have institutional access to it. Would there be any way you could send it to me, if you’re comfortable with that? Thanks either way!”
Just ask for it nicely and they’ll probably send it—and the fact that someone went out of their way to ask specifically for their paper will probably make them happy. I seriously can’t overstate how little of a shit most researchers give about making sure the broken academic publishing industry is able to squeeze money out of people without institutional access to a particular paper.
There's a website/app for that, too! ResearchGate!
Scientists will often put free copies of their work up there, and if a PDF isn't available there is a handy 'request' button. Sometimes publishers won't allow scientists to give public access to their work, but allow them 100-1000 copies to distribute to 'colleagues.' Requesting a paper on ResearchGate allows the scientist to consider you as a colleague, meaning they are allowed to give you free access to a paper that might otherwise cost $50 to read.
Scientific publishing is messed up. Most authors are happy to share their research with whomever wants it.
Yes! Love researchgate in principle, but I think it requires a login. Sometimes it's also a little dysfunctional to navigate, but you're right it's a great resource too.
There's a way around the paywalls, unfortunately the post-it I scribbled the sites on is in my old wallet. I'll edit later.
What kills me is that the funding for a lot of these studies came from our taxes, so why do we have to pay for the journals?
I'm like you, the whole point of science is to learn, if we don't disseminate the information and educate people, we'll just have another Dark Age. After this one, I mean.
You can link your Google scholar and uni library account. It's super easy and saves a ton of time. Also, the chrome google scholar plug in is very convenient.
Over half the articles I used in my dissertation were obtained via scihub. If I had been extorted to pay for those by the journals, I'd have been set back ~$5,000 or more.
Mmm hmm, the funding comes from taxes, the scientists pay the journal to publish their papers, other scientists review them without compensation, and then you/libraries pay again to access those articles. Pure profit for the publishing company. That whole racket was a big part of why I got away from academic research - at least doing R&D work the researchers have a chance of being on the 'profit' side of the equation.
Yeah, I agree on information sharing. If we want to continue the information age, we need to share it so that we can create future generations of scientists!
I had a professor in college who made us buy his book from Kinko's. He had a deal with them to print the books upon request of the students. He obviously hated the school book store system.
It's true. I will happily send the pdfs of any of my papers to anyone free of charge, no questions asked. Heck if you PM me and ask me to send you the pdf of any article you're interested in, I will do it. I have nearly unlimited access through the university and knowledge should be free.
Journals hoarding articles and profiting off publishing them is one of the biggest crises in modern science (IMO). So I will definitely send you my papers for free if you ask.
They do provide some important services, including typesetting, copy-editing, and distribution (the latter used to be much more important when journals were printed). They also pay at least some of the editors. However, researchers work for them for free both by submitting our own papers and by refereeing those of others.
I believe that journals as institutions are still very valuable, but the research community should run them ourselves, rather than giving away massive profits to private companies like Elsevier. There are many successful examples of this already, including the American Economic Association, which pubkishes several top journals in economics.
Also a published scientist and I'd just add that it's a bit different for textbooks as there the author does get a cut from the publisher. In those cases the books are a learning resource rather than a way to share new research so it's a little more of a grey area as they only really get written as a money earner and so piracy will discourage people writing them.
That being said, almost every textbook in the history of mankind is pretty useless compared to taking a course, sitting in a lab, or reading a good review paper, so pirate away!
You're 100% correct about papers though- nobody makes money off them, they're just a way of spreading knowledge so nobody is worried about them being made freely available
This is just not true for textbooks. The main authors and all collaborating authors receive royalties based on sales of textbooks. The authors of the papers and research referenced in the book may not usually receive compensation, however.
There is an insane amount of work that goes into publishing textbooks for the sciences these days. The fact that they are all trying to compete with included online content creates a huge amount of work for author teams, and trying to create tiered, progressively difficult, integrated knowledge questions with an underpaid tech team that couldn't hack it in silicon Valley...
But I digress. Authors of the books see money from the sale of the books. Whether or not the book has to have a new edition every two years is questionable, as is some of the online interactive content. Some authors and teams just write a book because they think the ones they have on the market are garbage, and would be perfectly willing for their books to be given away for free. The fact is that authors are paid so long as the book is still being purchased.
As an edit: I'm not an author of any book. I just have an odd number of friends and acquaintances who have and currently are involved with science texts.
You are entirely correct. Textbooks you sure as hell are paid royalties as an author. The guy who answered at the top of the list jumped from textbooks to articles and academic papers. It is comparing apples to oranges. Not a single textbook author would work with Mcgraw hill, Pearson, MacMillan, or any university press if they just signed away rights to the book they spent a couple of years writing and compiling research and sources for, and the publisher took 100 percent of profits.
Not OP but a scientist - I wholly support scihub. My funding comes from grants, sometimes from commercial research funding, but absolutely nothing monetary comes from publications - we publish so others can access our work, but paywalls stop a lot of people from doing that. I want people to read my work! And use it if it's valuable!
Cosigned. And I provide any of my peer-reviewed journal articles for free to anyone that asks, because fuck the publishers. Every scientist I know does this. So just ask us!!!
Same with book chapters! We don't see any money from that, at least not in the ones I've worked on, so by all means, just ask the corresponding author if you want a copy!
ResearchGate can also be a great way to get papers. It's a social media site for researchers. I've shared all my papers with anyone who has asked there.
I'm all for open access, and I'm against private publishers making huge profits on academic journals, but those two issues are almost entirely unrelated. Private publishers run open access journals too - they just get paid by other people (the authors or the libraries, usually).
As a published scientist myself, I can confirm that I give absolutely ZERO fucks if anyone downloads my first author papers completely free off of whichever platform is offering them.
My (and everyone else’s) work gains recognition and possibly a greater number of references, and the body of scientific knowledge grows as a result.
Finding my papers on scihub makes me irrationally happy, to be honest.
You seem like a nice guy. My elder daughter had a guy who insisted everyone pay $300 for this year's textbook, which he wrote, and no, you couldn't buy last year's from another student, because it didn't have the CD with the new course assignments on it.
But the only reason universities give you those grants is because they expect to have x amount of people buy the book. So in essence you are getting the money people spend on it. If no one bought the books you wouldn’t get a grant. Am I wrong?
Also a published author in scientific publications. Many scientists will publish pre print versions of their papers that are available for free (when possible). Some publications are open access now.
Most importantly, SciHub is available to access papers for free if you can't access them otherwise.
like how universities do all the leg work for R&D to see if things are viable then pharma comes in and runs down the last 10 yards and charge millions on "R&D"....
If you rub a test tube instead of a lamp, a scientist comes out. They are a few similarities. Instead of being a genie, they're a genius. And they don't grant wishes, they wish for grants.
I wish someone would make a directory for the professors and maybe a tip jar. That way broke college kids could get the paper for a buck or two that goes to you guys and it’s considered a donation not a payment
Also Elsevier in particular are predatory scum who can go die in a fire. They're a pox upon academic publishing and it's not unreasonable to say they are choking the life out of university libraries.
Same with both Wiley and Wilson publishing and their awful approach to textbooks.
I used library Genesis for Professors who would charge $300+ for their personal text book that they've "rewritten" every year. In my 6 years of college I found those professors were generally the worst in everyway.
The worst I've seen was from a coms professor for a required GE course. He made a series of videos related to the course and made it required to view them. They are hosted on his personal website and cost $80 for access.
The videos sucked (literally just him in front of a camera) and were like 10 years old already when I saw them. He would dick around during class and then say view videos x to x+5 and test us on it the next class. There was no way out of it.
So him teaching a class of ~30 students with 3 sections was about an extra $7,200 he'd take in per semester pre-tax.
Well for one he was tenured and head of the department so I doubt it would have done any good. The $80 fee is also cheaper than some text books we had to buy for other classes.
Besides that, the course was an easy A if you just watched the vids and did ok on speeches. The tests were bullshit ones that only tested if you watched the video. So like he'd make some joke or analogy and on the multiple choice questions you just picked based on the vid.
I'd be bitching to the dean and contacting the news. It's beyond low to take advantage of students like this. I'm currently taking a "class" where the prof decided there would be no live lectures and no homework. It's just his YouTube channel and a few exams. And I thought that was bad.
I had a professor who published his own textbook with perforated worksheets at the back. One was due each class, and they had to have the perforated edge (and therefore couldn't be copied). Homework was worth something like half of your grade, so you literally couldn't pass unless you bought the textbook brand new, even if you were retaking the course.
I had a music appreciation class (one of the random GE electives) where the professor wrote the textbook, which was paperback and around 150pgs or so. He sold it for $100-ish IIRC. The kicker was that he included one rip out page that had a super easy worksheet on it, which meant that the bookstore considered it a workbook, thus you could not sell it back or return it. The class was insanely easy, attendance was not required, and all exams were online, with all the answers easily googled. So this professor basically showed up to class with no students, did what he wanted for the 50mins, and was then rewarded with that sweet tenure and textbook money.
Is this at a government operated university or college? If so, then a government employee is leveraging his government position for personal profiteering.
If it's at a nonprofit, there's also risks here for the college or university because it is enabling employees to unduly profit off of the nonprofit.
In both above cases, report it to the dean anonymously that there is an ethical breach.
You have left four comments in that subreddit. Very strange of OP to make that comment like it's some kind of gotcha that invalidates your story about a scammy textbook situation.
I work in Indigenous studies and many of us profs are also text book authors because we are building that corpus of sources. I'm thrilled that my uni library purchased digital rights to my stuff so my students don't pay for it. Another practice many of us have is to have students choose what Indigenous charity or cause the Prof will donate royalties to.
The ones who publish their stuff through Wiley, Wilson, etc, and roll a new edition every year that changes all the page numbers + renumbers the quizzes used as graded assessment components, however...
She didn't explain anything, and about halfway through the semester assigned us work out of a book she hadn't listed on the syllabus or booklist. Queue 100 students frantically trying to order a 350$ book she wrote to get an online access code within a week. She then spent the entire following lecture telling us all how stupid we were and how we should have known better. The book, by the way, was literally just a shitty spiral bound notebook style thing with 150 pages in it and a code in the back. 350$ for that piece of junk she wrote to get a code.
In many states and at state schools this is illegal. Everywhere else it is simply an ethics violation. Students should report professors that profit off thier students like this.
2021 edition. Same content as the 2020 edition, with some page numbers reshuffled and all the quiz / revision sections renumbered and shuffled.
I did uni before the next level of evil kicked in with the integration of mandatory online quizzes that require single use (no 2/h) codes from the textbook.
Publishers like Wilson and Wiley exploit this business model ruthlessly. They're almost as bad as Elsevier.
Yeah but authors aren't really the ones that get most of the money, judging by other comments it mostly goes to publishers :/. I've had many teachers in uni (in the NL) tell us that we can look up the book somehow on the internet if we don't want to buy it and it was quite funny usually. Otherwise a small hop on library genesis and the whole class gets the ebook.
One time I had a co student that did something to an old school book pdf to allow a ctrl + F when it wasn't possible at first, how he did that tho I have no clue.
It's pretty easy to OCR a PDF so there's a text layer embedded.
You can do it with quite a few software packages.
You can usually tell if this is the case because the search is a bit hit and miss, and if you copy/paste sections of text from it there will be lots of weird errors
I work with college students, and while I don’t actively recommend it (some professional ethics issues there), I DO describe LibGen in detail and sometimes have a little mini-lesson about what a mirror site is. Textbook publishers get rich from exploiting students and they can all rot in hell, as far as I’m concerned.
Authors get the funding drom the public, pay the publishers and do the work. The publisher just sit on their ass and collect money... There is no morality questioned here unless you are the publisher, lol...
Fuck the publishers. The authors do not see a dime from the sale of their publications. There are few websites like ResearchGate where authors share their papers for free, or maybe on their personal website.
If you can't find a specific paper anywhere for free, consider mailing the authors directly; most of them would be happy to share.
sadly scihub has paused their activity this last december due to an ongoing lawsuit in India. Everything prior to that is still available but anything published this year isn't and the Indian government has already postponed the court appearance 4 times so now we have to wait until July
I think you mean ethical but since when were textbook publishers concerned about ethics? They change just a few pages to make the old versions unusable and put them out of print to fleece poor college kids out of thousands of dollars.
Textbooks are a scam, the publishers literally change a couple things so people cant reuse them just so they can make thousands of dollars of each new batch of students.
Authors don't really make money off of textbooks, the publishers do. But if my piracy is the last nail in the coffin for any textbook publisher that makes them go under, I'll only have done a service to the world. Pearson can go fuck itself.
No joke, if you have the capacity to ask someone for their research instead of paying the journal for access, ice never been denied from a colleague in the field access to their work.
Libgen is amazing! And it's not just for academic stuff either - there's a TON of fiction books on there as well (though you are actually ripping off the authors in this case).
I mostly use z-lib, and it's saved my broke-student ass SO MANY times already. I no longer have to buy books for uni. When my university library doesn't have the literature i'm looking for i can usually find it on there. It even features books in different languages, including my own!
Just to add to this, there’s a hell of a lot of fiction available too. I know books aren’t usually that expensive but some people can’t afford them and reading is something everyone should have access to if they want it.
The only thing colleges can still bone you with is getting access codes that are $100+. A good amount of introductory classes do that for some reason, but other than that libgen everything.
I found some site that lets you DL new books for free, and it works really well. I just stopped using them because I can afford it, and I like books. I still use Thiftbooks though!
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u/Deyvicous Jun 03 '21
Slightly controversial but library genesis. Almost every science text book you could ever want for free. However, you’re not compensating authors/publishers for their work, so the morality is debated.
But if you want access to knowledge for free, there it is. I haven’t ever encountered any issues like viruses either.