Many years ago (think: 1994) scientists (mainly CS folks) published papers on the web as postscript files. Actually, they were usually on FTP sites, not the web, as almost nobody used the web at the time. I developed a huge aversion to postscript (it was clunky and the renderers weren't great) but the idea that every bit of published science would be freely available on the web seemed completely and totally obvious to me.
When I later became an academic, I learned that when you write a paper and submit it, conditions for publication typically include signing away the copyright to the journal, possibly with a license to distribute a few preprints offline.
My advisor at the time pointed out that he actually modified the contract (changing the terms to retain copyright), signed it and sent it back (no journal ever complained, and all his papers are available as PDFs online).
arxiv is the closest thing to what I dreamt of some decades ago and I'm thrilled that Paul is receiving recognition. Personally, I think arxiv is a better path forward than scihub, entirely due to its "legitimacy". In the future, I will always work to "publish" on arxiv and not put my work in journals (fortunately, I am not in a publish or perish situation).
My only complaint is that I don't particularly like PDF and wish there was an HTML-zip format that could be sent around and the browser did all the rendering work, while the udnerlying data tables are stored in well-defined formats so they can be programatically extracted.
When I later became an academic, I learned that when you write a paper and submit it, conditions for publication typically include signing away the copyright to the journal, possibly with a license to distribute a few preprints offline.
My advisor at the time pointed out that he actually modified the contract (changing the terms to retain copyright), signed it and sent it back (no journal ever complained, and all his papers are available as PDFs online).
arxiv is the closest thing to what I dreamt of some decades ago and I'm thrilled that Paul is receiving recognition. Personally, I think arxiv is a better path forward than scihub, entirely due to its "legitimacy". In the future, I will always work to "publish" on arxiv and not put my work in journals (fortunately, I am not in a publish or perish situation).
My only complaint is that I don't particularly like PDF and wish there was an HTML-zip format that could be sent around and the browser did all the rendering work, while the udnerlying data tables are stored in well-defined formats so they can be programatically extracted.