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Originally Posted by pwalker8
I would suspect the issue is listing the well known pirate site specializing in academic papers, rather than expressing the opinion that academic journals should be excluded from copyright. Once moderators start to pruning posts, it can be easy to over prune.
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The issue was indeed both.. Some moderators thought my opinion was condoning piracy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
The area of copyright and patents for works done with public money is very much a gray area. I will say that in the US, educational use falls under the fair use doctrine.
The issue of academic journals, as opposed to the individual articles in them are a different matter. I suspect that in many cases one can get a copy of an academic article, just by contacting the author and asking. I also suspect that the law of unintended consequences would kick in if the actual journals were excluded from copyright. Most academic journals are expensive because they have a very limited readership and it cost money to put them out.
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I respectfully suggest that you do a little more reading about how copyright operates in the area of academic journals and the business model under which the companies involved operate. Basically academics face a publish or perish paradigm. They submit articles to these journals for publication, sign over all of their rights and receive no payment. Such articles are often based on publicly funded research. Other academics contribute peer review, usually unpaid or nominally paid. The journals are then sold to academic libraries at often ridiculous cost. Authors provide copies of articles at their peril, because they no longer own the rights to their own works or to some extent their own research. It is a dream of a business model for the journal owners, but a disaster for scientific research and a drain on educational funds much better used elsewhere.