So your institute went cold turkey on publisher X. What now?
In: science politics
universities and other research institutions in Germany are set to lose
subscription access to one of the main STEM publishers, Elsevier. The
reason being negotiations of the DEAL consortium (600 institutions
in total) with the publisher. In the run-up to these negotiations, all
members of the consortium were urged to not renew their individual
subscriptions with the publisher and most institutions apparently
followed this call. As the first Elsevier offer was rejected by DEAL and further negotiations have been postponed until 2017,
the participating institutions whose individual contract runs out this
year will be without continued subscription access – as long as they
don’t cave in and broker new individual contracts.
At first, this may seem like a massive problem for all students and
faculty at these institutions. However, there are now so many
alternative access strategies, that the well-informed scholar may not
even notice much of a difference. Here are ten different options, in no
particular order (feel free to offer more in the comments):
Keep trying to access the publisher’s site:
In many cases, the institutions have signed subscription contracts with
archival rights, meaning you have access to content that once was
subscribed. Moreover, many journals offer a ‘hybrid’ option, meaning
that some articles are made available open access by the authors paying
an extra fee. In both cases, the publisher site will still provide you
with access to the article in question, even though your institution has
not extended the subscription.
LOCKSS:
This is a solution for libraries which did not obtain archival rights
with the publisher. It keeps local copies of subscribed content
precisely for such cases. Ask your friendly librarian if you encounter
content that you know was once accessible but is now inaccessible – your
library will likely be able to assist you to get access via LOCKSS
Google Scholar:
Most entries in a GScholar search come not only with a non-publisher
version of the article, but even with several different access options.
PubMed:
For those of you who use PubMed, they link to various versions,
including the PMC version in their search results. I’ve also asked them
if they can link to other freely available versions. In many cases,
these version only become available after some embargo period.
DOAI / oaDOI:
You can copy and paste the digital object identifier (DOI) of any
article into services which locate a freely available version for you.
DOAI and oaDOI search preprint archives, researchgate or institutional
repositories for accessible versions.
#icanhazpdf:
For Twitter users, this hashtag attached to a link to the article will
alert other users of your need for this article. If someone has access,
they can send you the article.
Article payment: For
quick (but not free!) access to an article, just grit your teeth and
pay for the article (buy or rent). Some institutions are already
reimbursing such costs.
Contact author:A less speedy option is to contact the corresponding author and ask
them for a copy of the article. I remember doing this via snail mail in
the days before the internet – and receiving “offprint-requests” as
pre-printed postcard forms (filled in with type-writer) for my articles.
That’s how old I am.
Inter-library-loan: Even if more and more institutions are dropping
their big deal subscriptions, there are still many subscriptions
around. Your library can likely get you the article via the many
different versions of inter-library-loan (“Fernleihe” in German). If you
don’t know how to use this service, ask your friendly librarian for
assistance.
Sci-Hub:
If all else fails, there still is the option of obtaining the article
from Sci-Hub. It covers roughly 50% of all articles, so there is a
pretty good chance you’ll get what you need there. I have written before
why I find Sci-Hub to be a necessary and effective form of civil disobedience.
There is a catch, however. In many countries Sci-Hub is considered
illegal as it offers copyrighted content for download. While there is no
definitive, generally accepted decision, there is a lawsuit pending
brought by Elsevier against Sci-Hub. Legal opinions vary, but an early
consensus seems to emerge according to which individual downloads, while
infringing, are unlikely to be prosecuted, but institutions which fail
to follow up on publisher complaints may at some point become liable.
Use at your own risk.
These are ten different options (9 of them completely legal) to
obtain scholarly content without a current subscription to the scholarly
journal in question. The statistics on article availability as well as
my personal experience suggest that almost every article will be
available via at least one or more of these options.
Importantly: if you find that you can indeed access most of the content you need to read via such means, let your librarian know that you are fine with dropping subscriptions – it will eventually allow your institution to be able to afford providing you with a modern digital infrastructure.
UPDATE (Dec. 21, 2016): There were several questions
as to the legality of #icanhazpdf. Sharing of scholarly articles among
scholars has been standard practice for decades, if not centuries.
Hence, sending individual articles to individual scholars has never been
illegal and still is not to this day. The Twitter hashtag merely brings
two scholars togather for this age-old standard practice. Even Elsevier
explicitly allows such sharing (PDF):
Scholarly sharing of articles [8 above]h/t to Jochen Johannsen and Bernhard Mittermaier for the source.
Current ScienceDirect subscription agreements permit authorized users to
transmit excerpts of subscribed content, such as an article, by e-mail
or in print, to known research colleagues for the purpose of scholarly
study or research. Recipients of such scholarly sharing do not
themselves have to be affiliated with an institute with a ScienceDirect
subscription agreement.
UPDATE II (Jan.27, 2017): The latest version of the Open Access Button
also retrieves publicly available versions of paywalled articles, much
like DOAI or oaDOI. However, it comes with a critical improvement over
these two services: it allows you to send a request for any articles
that isn’t already covered and the OAButton team will try to make it
available. In that way, the OAButton not only provides you with the
articles, but also expands the coverage of publicly accessible research,
such that ever more content becomes available without subscriptions.
Thisis a wonderful development. More and more services providing you with
scholarly articles without a subscription. Remind me again, why do we
even have subscriptions? Subscriptions probably are the worst value for
money of any subsidized service our scholarly institutions provide us
with. We should cancel all subscriptions now, there is no need for them
and paying them constitutes fiscal irresponsibility, as far as I’m
concerned.
Share this:
- Shares
Like this:
bjoern.brembs.blog » So your institute went cold turkey on publisher X. What now?
No comments:
Post a Comment