Med Students Use P2P File Sharing To Get Restricted Access Papers

By Stuart Fox Posted 10.29.2009 at 10:14 am 3 Comments

Dr2Dr File Sharing?

While some companies hope an iTunes-like approach to distributing scientific papers on the cheap will get journal articles into the hands of people who need them, a new study shows that many medical students are already taking the Napster approach. A new paper studying the downloading habits of medical students found 125,000 users of peer-to-peer filesharing services who obtained some 5,000 scientific papers for free, circumventing the usual $30 fee.

This paper greatly complicates the issue of open access science journals. On the one hand, the users of the site knowingly stole copyrighted material. On the other, one could reasonably say that medical students, nurses and doctors should have access to information that could help them in their job of saving lives without the barrier of cost.

The downloading habits of the users of the site mirrored the general impact of scientific papers. Journal articles from Science and Nature received the most traffic, with Nature dominating the list with 118 papers.

In many ways, this paper raises more questions than it answers, like "why couldn't doctors and medical students access these papers for free, like college students can?" Certainly, as both the interest in viewing, and the fees for viewing, scientific papers rises, more and more instances of paper piracy will come to light. I guess everyone should just be happy that no one in Metallica is a doctor.

[via Ars Technica]

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3 Comments

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ijay79

10/30/09 at 5:47 am

As you have mentioned about how expensive is the single article which is even higher than the price of an issue of the journal. Which student is afford to spend 30$ for an article. He might only needed to see an experimental procedure in the article. Because of no much public attention, these Scientific peer review journals are having their own rule in pricing their articles. They also get more money from authors who want to publish their work on the journals. I always wonder if any one write any column or article in general magazines, the editor will pay the columnists. But why the hell, scientist should pay for publishing his work on the scientific journal. We are sure, these scientific journals are getting bulk money from their advertisers- wealthy scientific companies. Being a common scientist is really a toughest job because you have to depend on funds and grant for every 2 or 3 years. And your place is always an unstable one.

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capnthepeafarmer

11/02/09 at 10:59 am

A lot of journals can be found on google scholar, I used that for a bio-mechanics paper I wrote. If I couldn't get the whole thing through there then I could at least relay the ISBN to my universities library to get a temporary copy.

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killerqpid

11/13/09 at 4:52 am

hey i got an idea how bout only charging 10 bucks then maby people won't get it off the net "eh".....what a concept helping the students insead of screwin them...