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Address handling of paywall'ed articles

Open mhucka opened this issue 7 years ago • 3 comments

In recent additions to this research, I added PDFs of articles that may in some cases be under paywall even if I managed to find them on the internet. We need to decide on a policy about including such PDFs. Some initial options that come to mind:

  1. Don't worry about it
  2. Remove the PDFs and link to the article websites and let readers sort out access
  3. Remove the PDFs and link to whatever Google Scholar links to

mhucka avatar Sep 05 '17 03:09 mhucka

Me wearing my licensing hat now -- I prefer not uploading/hosting files that we have murky rights to distribute.

Another option is to dis-aggregate pdfs from the repo and have 'em elsewhere (e.g. a dropbox folder or gdoc), that way they aren't public and we can avoid slow size creep for this repo

dcwalk avatar Sep 05 '17 13:09 dcwalk

One practice that has served me well is linking to things that are already online, but not actively hosting them ourselves (even Google does that). We could also notate which articles are behind a paywall.

jschell42 avatar Sep 05 '17 13:09 jschell42

@jschell42 I think you're right, that linking is the way to go for the public view of the research docs.

Unfortunately, I probably won't be able to take the time to add annotations about what's paywalled or not. Spending time figuring out what is paywalled can take more time than I can afford to give it. (Not saying this to be pompous, just making an assessment of available time.)

@dcwalk Putting the PDFs elsewhere is a good idea. For right now, I could move those PDFs out of the repo into a new location, and then later we can think about how to make the process efficient in the future. Is there a Dropbox location already for such things, or should I put them in a personal Dropbox folder? (And if the latter, who should be given access?)

mhucka avatar Sep 05 '17 16:09 mhucka