Thursday, 1 December 2016

publications - How often are authors not allowed to send their paper by email upon request?


Emailing the authors of a paper is a common way to obtain access to the paper when it is behind paywalls. However, publishing contracts may forbid authors to send their paper by email.


Is there any research/study/survey that tried to quantify how often authors are not allowed to send their paper by email upon request? I am especially interested in papers written in English.





The RoMEO Journals database contains thousands of journals, labeled with their archiving policy (preprint/postprint/publisher's version):


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Except of the database:


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That gives an approximate lower bound on how often authors are allowed to send their paper by email upon request, since if an author can upload a preprint/postprint/publisher's version to a repository, they are most likely allowed to send it to someone by email upon request.




Looking at the publishers might give a decent approximation but journals from the same publisher may have different policies, e.g. http://www.nature.com/news/gates-foundation-research-can-t-be-published-in-top-journals-1.21299:



A spokesperson for Nature’s publisher, Springer Nature, said that most Springer Nature journals do comply with the Gates Foundation policies. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of the journal Nature.) But a “small number”, including Nature and some Nature-branded research titles, do not.




Related: Am I allowed to share a final copy of my published paper privately?




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