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by azhenley 2272 days ago
If you ever find an ACM (or IEEE) paper that you don't have access to, chances are you can find the preprint on one of the author's website.

The easiest way is to search for the paper on Google Scholar and see if there is a link that says "[PDF]" or "All X versions".
1 comments
capableweb 2272 days ago
That's a very good recommendation. And if you can't find the preprint on the authors website, I've had good success just emailing the author and asking for a copy. That's successful in 99% of the cases where I couldn't find it officially for free or as a preprint. Most authors seems more than happy to provide you with a copy.

And if that finally doesn't work out, there is always sci-hub.si and their alter egos (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub)

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apetresc 2272 days ago
Are authors technically allowed to do that? (Not _should_ they be allowed, but _are_ they)?

If so, where does the line get drawn? Are they allowed to have an auto-responder that responds to any specially-formatted email with a copy of the requested paper? Can they just put the paper up on their website? Can they just allow their website to be aggregated by someplace that collects all such papers?

I'm sure the legal line is drawn somewhere between those two extremes but I have no idea where.

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capableweb 2272 days ago
Good question. I initially got told by friends in academia that this is all fine and what they all do if they can't access the paper and they would also hand it over if someone emailed them asking for a copy.

In the end, I guess it depends on who the copyright of the published paper belongs to. If it belongs to the authors, they are free to do as they please, if it belongs to the publisher, you should actually email the publisher and ask for a copy (but good luck with that).

Here are some resources with more thoughts from people in academia and outside on the subject:

- https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/21440/is-it-rig...

- https://www.quora.com/How-can-I-send-requesting-email-to-res...

- https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can_we_send_published_pape...

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detaro 2272 days ago
The exact policy depends on the venue, but to take the named orgs above as an example, if I remember correctly both IEEE and ACM allow publishing the preprint version of a paper on the researchers website, but an aggregator could probably not copy them without permission.
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