That $35 that scientific journals charge goes 100% to publisher, 0% to authors
Is it strictly true that authors are allowed to send you their papers if you email them? Are they allowed to send the published version, or must they send a preprint? If they can send you the published version, why can't they host it somewhere? And if they can only send the preprint version, why not put it up on arXiv anyway?I don't mean to cast doubt on the tweet's purpose (I agree with it), and for what it's worth I've emailed other researchers for paper access as well. I would just like to see some proper legal analysis behind these questions, because I see the same point repeated frequently by scientists who are not lawyers.It would be pretty cool if there were a platform that automated your request to get a paper from an author. I don't know how that would be plausible without hosting the papers though, and I imagine that would get into trouble.