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flac  ·  3210 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Research Pirates of the Dark Web.

I study Anthropology, and this is a pretty hotly debated topic in my field. One of my professors, who does his work in Ghana, never even saw the finished version of one of his articles until one of his informants gave him a pirated PDF of it. He would have had to pay about $40 just to get a digital copy of his own work.

It's particularly shitty because many scholarly journals don't even allow their writers to reproduce their articles for free once they have them published, so if they want to fight back and have their articles freely available, they essentially have to either be unpublished, or published in much more obscure sources.