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.
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.