Your supervisor is able to give you papers because your uni pays licence fees for publishers.
and as far as I kow, publishers allow authors to give out a small amount of copies for their peers (internal use).


They deserve that. They should have thought before breaking the law. :p


You can not. But would it be possible to issue an order to close down a university permanently? :p



They have the right to do that because they have paid for it.

Or have they? A plain CLA licence does not usually allow copying of multiple articles but if they have a permission from the publishers everything should be ok..


I'd not like to comment..

I am really pleased that your university will buy you any and every paper you want. Sadly we are not all in that position - some peopel are in the developing world where they are trying to break into research with few if any resources (I have researchers I work with in Eastern Europe (EU countries) who have no access to journals and no possibility of accessing them). Eand even when we are we can't necessarily get them quickly.

We are trying to create a community here where people help each other and when you have been around longer you will realise that those who are helpful get the most help back. Those who come on here and just snipe, criticise or advertise their useless "help" or essay writing services get ignored or worse. You may find that you will get lots of people reading your threads but not many replying. But you will be OK becuase your university will sort it for you....

www.tvsquad.com/media/2006/03/homer-doh.jpg

Err aren't you breaching copyright here? Where is the copyright? You haven't acknowledged Matt Groening, or Fox.
Or is that Ok becuase it is just a cartoon.

No, I am not. I offered you a link, not the picture.

(up)

Further to that allowing researchers relatively unfettered access to journals is a good thing. It benefits the journals/publishers because it means they become widely read, they get cited and their reputation has a chance to increase. Which in all likelihood outweighs any benefits/profit they get from charging individuals $40 to $50 a pop for time limited access to a journal.

My university is a lower-tier post-92 university (ex-poly). I am very thankful and happy that they use
the money which they collect from their students wisely (by enhancing their library resources in this case).
I am not sure if everybody has been so lucky than I have been. But at least I have been able to retrieve the
articles I want from e-publishers or at least librarians have done everything to submit me a legal copy.

You presented a couple of apposite points to make your case. Stealing may be morally right sometimes. But not
if it becomes a habit.

As for the quickness, I consider it not to be a good excuse. Why should we get everything fast or now?

Being pedantic...we're not actually talking about stealing here. No theft takes place. The publishers are not being deprived of property.

Sorry. English is not my first language. I should have selected my words more wisely. You are right. If somebody steals a magazine or a book from a bookstore that is called stealing. But, in my opinion, in cyberspace, where information is in intangible form, accessing non-free information without paying for it (taking a copy) can be considered to be stealing..

======= Date Modified 13 Oct 2010 16:38:48 =======
======= Date Modified 13 Oct 2010 16:21:34 =======

Hi Eskobastion

As the new moral adjudicator of the forum I just wanted to clarify your point regarding it being 'morally right sometimes'. How many times? I have from time to time assisted fellow forumites (and they me) with the odd paper and a spot of advice. I will of course be presenting myself at my local police station now that I realise that whilst I was only trying to be helpful (and get that first elusive star!) I have indeed committed a heinous crime (akin to that bloke 'knock of Nigel' they keep talking about in all those dvd trailers).

But back to my earlier point - as of yet - it does not seem to have been habit forming. Am I redeemed given that my infringements only occurred under the 'sometimes' category???

I honestly think if academic publishers perceived it to be a big problem, then they could do something with digital rights management software. Anyroad, Ekobastian, your thesis on the illegality of sharing a subscription based article with a third party is unfounded. That's what happens when you chose to selectively post bits and bats from the terms and condition. What Wiley-Interscience actually say, above the bit you posted is:

Authorized Users [someone at an institution that subscribes to the journal] may transmit to a third-party colleague in hard copy or electronically, a single article or item from Wiley InterScience for personal use or scholarly, educational, or scientific research or professional use but not for re-sale.

So, Jepsonclough was well within rights to help Satchi and will narrowly avoid prison on this occasion. I hope your thesis isn't in the field of law :$

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iISyPz5XRyI

Thanks Wally - I will sleep easy in my bed tonight ;-) I was so worried that I would be thrown in prison where I would have no access to journals so I could learn the error of my ways.

Of course I probably should check that Satchi isn't going to make thousands of copies of this amazing article and set up a stall undercutting the publishers and inter-library loans and make her fortune...

You aren't going to do that are you Satchi?
(Or at least if you are can I have a cut?:p)

======= Date Modified 13 Oct 2010 16:33:57 =======

Fair enough  ;-) I would still make a distinction between the two though. As it stands the distribution of a copy does not deprive the publishers of property, it causes no actual physical loss even if we extend that to mean their current bank balance. The only thing they lose in any sense is a potential individual sale. And they don't lose that whilst another person benefits from a sale when a copy is simply passed on.

They should frankly look to why they're losing individual sales. Access to journals on a Uni wide scale, through general subscriptions, is fine but at the individual level the cost quickly becomes prohibitive. As researchers we're both the content providers and the content users and the publishers' current business model only satisfies one end of that equation, and not very well. There's no point producing papers via a journal if access to that journal is limited. And there's little point paying high prices for individual papers (check the science direct costs for one) when you get very little for it. I refuse to spend that much money on a paper that I cannot keep. I'd would rather go without but that's more harmful to the authors than it ever would be to the publishers.

They need to rethink their business model if the current sharing bothers them. Which, I imagine, it doesn't.

Edit: walminski sharp legal mind has pretty much rendered all that moot! :D

Well I hope you remember that quickness is not an excuse next time you are up against a submission deadline and the British Library is your only legal hope - if you can afford to wait a week for an article then some (not me of course) might think you are underemployed.

Many of us are doing our PhDs part time while balancing full time jobs, health difficulties, caring responsbilities (children, parents with dementia etc) and we squeeze our research into the evenings, weekends and annual leave. In those cases if we don't get the article now it will be of no use to us.

You are obviously in a far more priviliged position than many of us and I think you should appreciate that and not criticise the rest of us.

======= Date Modified 13 Oct 2010 16:42:33 =======

Presumably you could still use the 'Inter Library Loan' system from the prison library? and / or send satchi your first visiting order :p