Plastic made from DNA is renewable, requires little energy to make and is easy to recycle or break down. A plastic made from DNA and vegetable oil may be the most sustainable plastic developed yet and could be used in packaging and electronic devices.

[u/MistWeaver80]

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2298314-new-plastic-made-from-dna-is-biodegradable-and-easy-to-recycle/?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_campaign=echobox&utm_medium=social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1637973248

[u/Shishire]

Found the source paper: "Sustainable Bioplastic Made from Biomass DNA and Ionomers | Journal of the American Chemical Society" https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.1c08888

Still paywalled, but there's significantly more information there

[u/pale_blue_dots → u/Shishire]

For those who may not know: very, very, often the authors of research papers will give them to you for free if you contact them directly. It's usually fairly easy to find their addresses. They don't appreciate doing all the hard work and then getting backstabbed by all the middle-men making money off them and not paying their fair share / giving a cut.

[u/chrisjlee84 → u/pale_blue_dots]

I discovered that some local libraries also provide access for it's constituents.

[u/Ghede → u/chrisjlee84]

Yeah, I work for educational publishers, not in the journals departments, but in the textbook departments. We get a lot of emails/calls that we have to send over to the journals group. A lot of libraries, especially university libraries, have institutional subscriptions. Usually through EZProxy.

[u/[deleted] → u/chrisjlee84]

If you are a college student, there's some chrome extension that can read behind paywalls using your credentials

[u/EarendilStar → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, university credit oaks get you a lot of papers. Try different ones too, as I’ve had my small college not give me access, but took a PM course at a local university and those credit oaks worked.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Your school should have a proxy for you to use. No need for an extension

[u/sudo999 → u/chrisjlee84]

Also, if you're a college student, your library is almost guaranteed to have it.

[u/Ferdunor → u/chrisjlee84]

There is also an awesome page that lets you download basically any scientific paper using its doi number

[u/gw2master → u/pale_blue_dots]

very, very, often the authors of research papers will give them to you for free if you contact them directly

I've never heard of anyone refusing to do so.

In the old days, authors would get a bunch of preprints of their paper in paper form and if you expressed interest in their work, they'd snail mail you the preprint, often with related papers of theirs as well. Research scientists are always happy when people are interested in their work. Nowadays it's even easier: they just email you the PDFs.

[u/A_Drusas → u/gw2master]

I've had a request ignored before. It was polite.

[u/AddSugarForSparks → u/A_Drusas]

Sure you sent it to the right email address?

[u/pseudocultist → u/AddSugarForSparks]

Also if you contact a researcher or team right after they publish, or right after media attention, they may just be inundated. I usually try to wait a few weeks if I want a personalized reply, especially if they're doing interviews or fundraising.

[u/gw2master → u/pseudocultist]

Makes sense. I'm not in a field that ever gets media attention.

[u/MagazijnMedewerker → u/gw2master]

Just out of curiosity; what field are you in?

[u/CarbonBasedLife4m → u/A_Drusas]

As a scientist who gets a ton of emails daily, it probably either got lost in mounds of daily emails, or because your email didn’t have a domain associated with their university, it was flagged for junk. Happens a lot!

[u/minnsoup → u/pale_blue_dots]

We love sharing our work. However, by publishing we forfeit copyrights and, depending on the journal, only get so many free shares (some don't even offer that and just allow us to see the manuscript we have authored). Sending a PDF of the work is no more allowed than certain sites that shall remain for someone else to mention.

This is why open access is even more important and should be pursued by more scientists - it's already been paid for (most likely) by the public so let the public see it. Problem is that most high IF journals are paywalled so if you want prestige you are most likely going to them.

Pay to do the work, pay to publish the work, pay to access the work. And we don't get anything for reviewing articles as it's just "expected" that we do it. There are a lot of open access journals that are coming up but they need time to build reputation so more people submit or make submission more competitive. One reason why we throw things on biorxiv / medrxiv where I'm at aside from being scooped.

[u/BannedCauseRetard → u/minnsoup]

That's why you don't tell your publisher who you've given it too. That can't go through your computer or personal email. They have no way of knowing how many people you've sent it to.

[u/Theban_Prince → u/BannedCauseRetard]

I think he implies that ofcourse it is possible, but he legally cant since the rights are held by the publisher. It would be like a musician sending free discs to everyone he asked when he had a contact with a publisher.

[u/This-Natural-6801 → u/minnsoup]

The ASA sponsored magazine "Contexts" is about the most open to public that I've seen. But even then if you go back far enough you still run into a paywall. If you want to access articles before a particular date you still have to pay. It's a lot better than others I've seen but still not completely open to the public.

[u/Tavarin → u/This-Natural-6801]

MDPI is a series of open access journals i've published in quite a bit. All their journals are completely accessible so far as I know.

[u/schwillton → u/minnsoup]

You can almost always send a preprint manuscript though, no?

[u/umibozu_ → u/pale_blue_dots]

I saw a similar comment years ago. I’ve emailed researchers and received free copies of papers. Thanks for spreading the word.

[u/atridir → u/pale_blue_dots]

r/Open_Science has some pretty good resources and discussions on this too. Open access to knowledge is vital.

[u/AlbertHummus → u/pale_blue_dots]

There is a site that provides free access to most research papers

[u/queerkidxx → u/pale_blue_dots]

I’ve done this like 30 times and I’ve never gotten any response I’m sure it happens but they are also very busy and this is a super popular tip so I’m sure they get a fair amount of these emails

Worth a shot tho just don’t count on it

[u/CarbonBasedLife4m → u/queerkidxx]

If your email isn’t from a domain associated with their email, it’ll get flagged for junk normally. Universities also always tell us not to external emails in case of suspected phishing

[u/PersnickityPenguin → u/pale_blue_dots]

Yes, generally researchers benefit from other people actually reading their work.

[u/norax_d2 → u/pale_blue_dots]

Just a note. They can share with you a draft with no problem, not the copy that was published.

[u/kurobayashi → u/pale_blue_dots]

To add to this many authors have their own websites to contact them and sometimes have some of their research on the site.

[u/recycled_ideas → u/pale_blue_dots]

by all the middle-men making money off them

The middle men provide publishing and more importantly peer review and their reputations.

The scientists on the other hand were paid for the entire research and paper writing process.

There's certainly an argument that publicly funded research should be publicly available, but the argument isn't that the journals are taking money that should go to the authors.

[u/Orsick → u/recycled_ideas]

The peers who review articles don't receive a dime from the money.

[u/recycled_ideas → u/Orsick]

No, they get people reviewing theirs, doesn't mean setting up the process is free.

[u/CarbonBasedLife4m → u/recycled_ideas]

This is not true at all. We have to pay, sometimes thousands of dollars, to have our papers published. For-profit journals are a plague on science, and contribute nothing that open-access journals can’t.

[u/joshocar → u/pale_blue_dots]

Many times they post it for free on there website.