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Honestly I’ve heard this and seen it written very many times, but any time I’ve ever reached out to a lead author to request access to their paper I’ve been met with zero reply. Like, nothing, from at least six different attempts (that I can remember right now). And I’m a government employee emailing from a government domain, usually with a very well written plea for information. Maybe I’m the unlucky one?
Oh, government email domain would scare anyone off. It's as bad as a "fbi.com" address. I doubt the permission is really there as the post says, what I have seen is the contrary. Anyway, try with a regular email address. If you want, as background story, say you're a student in a third-world country. That's how I lived before Sci-Hub (via VPN) and it worked out most of the time (e.g. ~75% success rate).
Thanks for the advice - I’ll definitely take that into account! To be clear (without doxxing myself) my emails came from a ‘.nsw.gov.au’ address so I hope that wouldn’t steer many academics away from sharing their findings, especially those whose research was conducted in other Anglophonic countries (specifically the US and Canada). I can understand the hint of hesitation though. I always assumed using my .gov.au email would have evaded spam filters, but perhaps my regular email address might have more luck.
I should also state that the research I’ve been trying to access is predominately psychological or social work academia (I’m a child protection caseworker), and I’m not sure if the same “share it if you got it” mantra applies in those fields.
Professors these days are extremely overworked - it's possible it simply got lost, plus it's not their business to provide a copy, especially for someone they think might be able to get one via their own means. Anyway you are right: it doesn't always work.:-)
Try contacting the non-lead authors (even if the article says "contact email"; usually the journal insists you pick one, but the others are also free to send you the article.)
When I was in academia, my inbox was like 40% emails like "publish your next article here", " you are invited to conference x", "your article on x". You get a lot of spam that is generated with text snippets from your work, so it is very targeted. You just have to start ignoring most emails. The other 60% is just work convos from known sources, so it is very easy to separate the two. Or kind of... you could still get an invitation or a review request, but you sort of know peoples names and names of joirnals. I guess its just hard to get by this.
I've not tried much, but it has worked for me from a normal Gmail address.
I graduated 4 years ago and don't have access to my academic email anymore. So maybe checking for an author still at the institution might help. Could also be unlucky.