How to Get Free Access to Academic Papers on Twitter
No one wants to pay $30 to read a research paper from 1987. Most academic journals charge expensive subscriptions and, for those without a login, fees of $30 or more per article. Now academics are using the hashtag #icanhazpdf to freely share copyrighted papers. Scientists are tweeting a link of the paywalled article along with their email address in the hashtaga riff on the infamous meme of a fluffy cats I Can Has Cheezburger? line. Someone else who does have access to the article downloads a pdf of the paper and emails the file to the person requesting it. The initial tweet is then deleted as soon as the requester receives the file. Andrea Kuszewski, a San Francisco-based cognitive scientist who started the hashtag, tells Quartz that the biggest rule is that you dont thank people. Those who willingly share papers are, in most cases, breaking copyright laws. But Kuszewski says its an important act of civil disobedience, adding its not an aggressive act but its just a way of saying things need to change. Quartz reached out to academic publisher Elsevier and will update this post with any response. She explains that many people are becoming increasingly frustrated with a business model where work that is produced by academics, edited by their peers, and often funded by the taxpayer, is hidden behind a paywall. If someone doesnt want to pay the subscription price on, say, The New York Times , she says, they often can go read the news elsewhere, but this isnt the case for academic papers behind a paywall because thats the only place to find the full work. Publishers who use the paywall model insist its vital to maintain the quality of the journal but others have shifted. Since 2003, when the only major open-access publishers were PLOS and BioMedCentral , the number of open-access journals has risen. Kuszewski says the internet has changed everything and people are simply no longer willing to pay $30 to read a paper from 1987. In the meantime, she hopes the hashtag will pressure publishers to change their outdated model.