[albutr]

Definitely a great resource, but (thankfully) it's almost completely redundant in a lot of fields. I'm willing to bet almost no one in my department has ever actually used it, or even heard of it, thanks to preprint servers like arXiv where almost everyone publishes their work for free on their own (usually either before or after publishing in a real journal, but some subfields have taken to exclusively publishing there).

I think fields outside of physics and math have caught on recently; there's now a bioRXiv, PsyArXiv, and ChemRxiv. That last one, kind of surprisingly, is actually co-owned and run by ACS and RSC, two of the largest chemistry publishing companies (who, iirc, had some weird terms that initially made some people weary about using preprints at all when publishing in their journals). Hopefully more publishers can follow suit and support open access across more fields.

[aaron-lebo]

This is my experience in political science as well.

Poli sci is starting to get some really good repositories of data (replication is something we actually care about), but for a long time common practice has been to post your paper on your own site. Nobody is going to stop you.

Ex.

https://sites.google.com/site/brynrosenfeld/research

These are a number of articles in major journals which if you go through Wiley are closed access, but a quick search will bring it up. The only reason that doesn't happen is the author doesn't want to do it, which is detrimental to them because their research isn't promulgated as easily.

This stuff tends to be working itself out outside of SciHub, it's just the most visible route (probably because the approach is so newsworthy, being illegal and taking on big interests).

[kingkongjaffa]

I wish there was a an arXiv for mechanical engineering, sadly most of the research is funded by industrial companies seeking competitive advantage so papers are less freely shared. Most of my masters thesis research sources came from paid-by-industry research projects.

[jerf]

Well, if you're feeling ambitious, you may be able to get one going with some elbow grease yourself. A lot of the marketing work has already been done now, with the success of the other ones.

And if that's not your cup of tea, that's fine too; I don't mean this as a "put up or shut up". Just putting up an idea you may not have had.

[akvadrako]

I don't know what field you are talking about, but in physics only about 95% of papers I want to read are published on arXiv, including older ones. I assume most researchers occasionally read something from scihub or subscription services.

[tomrod]

Downside to this is if there is a major revision during publication peer review that doesn't get reflected in arxiv. Economics has has SSRN for years, and while not as widely adopted I would presume the issues between the two are similar.