Until we Humpty Dumpty these motherfuckers off their paywall, here are eight ways you can get to good science
"If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." -Isaac Newton
“Here’s the man [Dr. Anthony Fauci], who helped to create COVID in the first place.” -Tucker Carlson
This is adapted for previous work I did, but I wanted to bring it back like a lazier Jonah Lehrer because two major things happened in science lately. One, Sci Hub went dark. Two, overly constipated conspiracy mongers are freely distributing disinformation that is killing people. Both these things relate to the issue I am most concerned about. When the good information is locked away, the bad information runs amok completely unchecked. All while ineffectual intellectuals either turn their noses up at the hoi polloi or wring their hands asking whyyyyyy????? what is to be doneeeee???? Well, I’ll fucking tell you.
To have any basic understanding of a scientific concept, you have to do some background research. Peer-reviewed research is a cornerstone of good science. Essentially, if you want to publish research you did, it has to get past a group of your expert peers that are supposed to check your math, tell you to slow your roll if you are making too strong of claims, and make sure you aren’t completely batshit. Without it, you get your crazy racist uncle sharing weird blogs about 5G on Facebook. There are some issues with this process but the biggest that I want to cover today is that society typically has to pay to get access to published peer-reviewed research which is antithetical to the whole point of science. We should be creating knowledge that is shared with and improves society. It’s never been perfect. After all, back in the day to be a scientist or philosopher you had to be a trustafarian male with too much time on his hands and the privilege of having been taught to read and write. While we have eroded many barriers to knowledge, the paywall stands.
Most of the good academic work is locked behind massive paywalls in a most bogus system (to stand on the shoulder of the philosophical giants Bill and Ted.) Scientists do research, mostly for low pay through taxpayer money, submit it to peer-reviewed journals without getting paid anything, and then most of these journals lock those research papers away and require exorbitant fees for researchers and taxpayers to get access to what they paid for already and even created! This even then increases your tuition and fees to go to college. Think about this, us Millennials and Zoomers have more student loan debt and you Boomers are dying from COVID vaccine hesitancy because these fucks refuse to let go of their greed. Honestly, I don’t see much of a difference between this public health crisis and when the Sacklers bankrolled the opioid crisis.
I get that it costs money to maintain websites and pay copy editors, but they have exorbitant profit margins for very little work, especially since printed journals are of yesteryear. All they are doing is copy editing and maintaining websites with free content created from scientists funded by the taxpayer. This is a sweeter gig than when Buzzfeed just rips off anonymous Reddit posts by slapping some stupid fucking emoji on it like a little bow. This Vox article explains more about how totally whack the whole paywall system all is, if you want further knowledge. But you can get to some of the knowledge that is owed to you. Here are eight ways, from most legal and legit to least legal, but still very legit.
If you happen to already be associated with a college or research institution, they are already paying these huge fees. So do research through those databases. State schools also typically offer limited free access to the public through old school land agreements promising they will educate the surrounding community. You do typically have to physically go to their library. But call and find out what they got for you.
Public libraries also have access to many of the same databases universities and colleges do. Ask your friendly local librarian how to get access to them. Seriously, libraries are so under utilized it’s crazy. Sexy librarians be thirsty to help you find reference materials.
Google Scholar will search for peer review only articles. If you have immediate free access to an article there will be a link on the side of the search hit. These free ones come from random webpages or Open Access journals which are free to all. Journals with paywalls will typically ask you for $35 a pop.
Ask the authors or a scientist friend directly. It is perfectly legal for people to hand off individual copies for educational and scholarly purposes. So email the corresponding author. But you’ll have to hope for the best because we are busy and are terrible at email. Side note: I’m pretty damn sure any attempt at accessing a science article is for scholarly or educational purposes. It’s not like these things are pervertables.
A lot of peer-reviewed research is dense, super technical, and not written well. So there is plenty of good science journalism, books, podcasts, and documentaries that talk about the research you want in a way you want to learn about it. Just be mindful that it doesn’t always get it right. I highly recommend this episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight about that. Because a ton of science journalism is hot garbage. I’m not just talking about whackos like Tucker Carlson spewing lies; much of it is overly simplified or makes wild claims not backed by the actual evidence. Also, Radiolab has way too many sound effects. Why the fuck you need to put a sick reverb followed by a loud “bbeeeeeeuuuooooooppp” sound after each question, Jad Abumrad?
Pre-print databases. A new movement has come to put research projects that have not been published out for free for others to see. This is a cool movement for two reasons. One, since not all research gets published, we can get a bigger understanding of the research as a whole. We are then fighting against the “file drawer” problem where studies with non-supported hypotheses go to die in a file drawer in the basement of some research lab. And two; peer review takes a while. So in cases like the COVID pandemic, you can get important information out quickly. The downside is they have not been vetted yet so many of the early COVID papers were pre-prints that researchers had to walk back on even though the faulty conclusions linger in the public consciousness. The largest examples of these databases are the arXiv family and the Open Science Foundation.
OK, so these next couple are not really legal because these big publishers have massive lobby efforts and are taking our tax-payer funded research under hostage in what was supposed to be one of the first truly revolutionary and democratic mechanisms human society created since the written word and the printing press…Facebook groups and Reddit subforums do exist for direct peer-to-peer article sharing. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ so as not to blow up their spot, but they do exist in a legal grey area. Some sleuthing and you’ll find them.
Sci-Hub. It is/was Napster for academics to download peer reviewed articles. For you Zoomers- Napster was where you could download all the music and computer viruses you wanted for free back in the day in a massive peer-to-peer file sharing platform. It’s constantly been a cat and mouse game, with Sci Hub moving from host country to host country while international assholes like the journal monolith Elsevier chase it down and use legal systems as their little henchmen. It is currently dark and may not return. But oh, it was such a wonderful place! You could get almost any article you wanted and it was a better user experience than any other peer reviewed article platform in existence. University and Library databases are all fucking terrible user experiences and hamstrung by red tape. Google Scholar is very limited and spotty at best. Sci Hub was bae. RIP.
Until the ethically and legally appropriate systems are in place where all well vetted scientific research is accessible to the world, we are stuck with the liemongers pumping hot garbage on cable news and social media (Substack included- tons of antivax assholes here) while the truth lags far far behind. But until then, you have Biowhack’s full support in ripping these assholes off however you can. And supposedly, Substack will help me with legal issues. So Elsevier, come at me Bro! Remember, this in no way harms the scientists doing the actual work. In fact, they want their work read and cited and paywalls limit that. We all hate it and these above techniques only screw over the robber barons of the information superhighway. And you don’t have to pay a cent to learn cool stuff. That’s a win-win in my book. Might even call it a lifehack.
I’ll be in the Bay Area and So Cal for a couple weeks, so I’ll leave y’all on read with a relavant song from The Coup
-Your Favorite Whackologist
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