It’s truly horrific that as an interested layman I am completely UNABLE to read most scientific papers. And to think about what they did to Aaron Schwartz…
They usually send you a 'pre-print' which (in their opinion - I'm not a lawyer) is not subject to the same copyright as the final reversion which was sent to review.
Thanks. Any sources for their opinion? Probably I shd read the copyright release form in more detail, but if you think terms of copyright this won't fly.
“Authors publishing via subscription models may also self-archive a copy of the accepted version of their manuscript (post-peer review, but prior to copy-editing and typesetting) in an institutional or subject repository, where it can be made openly accessible after an embargo period, in accordance with the relevant Springer Nature self-archiving policy (Nature, Springer, or Palgrave Macmillan)”
- via their non-commercial personal homepage or blog
- by updating a preprint in arXiv or RePEc with the accepted manuscript
- via their research institute or institutional repository for internal institutional uses or as part of an invitation-only research collaboration work-group
- directly by providing copies to their students or to research collaborators for their personal use
- for private scholarly sharing as part of an invitation-only work group on commercial sites with which Elsevier has an agreement
After the embargo period
- via non-commercial hosting platforms such as their institutional repository
- via commercial sites with which Elsevier has an agreement“*
(Seems a bit less constrained than SpringerNature)
Even if it is potentially technically illegal, I don't know about anyone who tried to stop it. Note that some release forms explicitly allow author's versions of the covered work for download on the author's website. There's usually a stipulation that they need to be different in some way, for example by not using the same formatting template as the journal/conference version of the paper.
It is truly awful that publishers do this, however there is a certain website-that-shalt-not-be-named that is papering over that gap while we researchers get our shit together.
You can usually find a pre-print by Googling the title.
Or ask the author for a copy.
(You shouldn't have to do this, but you can until all papers are open access anyway.)