rationalskepticism.org

Mr.Samsa wrote:I imagine that the problem is this bit:

3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

This is why you can't copy and paste an entire news article and post it on a forum. So it would be illegal to distribute a full version of a copyrighted article (which is any that has been published), but it's fair use to reproduce sections of it for educational purposes.

So what about copying the Methods and Results sections of a paper, and the thesis? Because these are the educational "meat" of a paper. Posting just the discussion and conclusion [or abstract] really tells us nothing-we do not know how the authors got to a particular conclusion. Likewise, just publishing results does not tell us much, because one needs to know the methodology of how they obtained and massaged their data. Just the methods alone may allow you to repeat the experiment, but that does not tell you much about the published work, because you are ignorant of their results and discussion.

In short, there is limited value [at best] in copying and posting only part of a paper, so the educational value is in conflict with the Intellectual Property concerns.

So I say we boycott all papers that are not Open Access in the Journal Club thread.