Wounded king,
I believe that most publishers of scientific articles permit licensed users (i.e. University students, faculty, personal subscribers) to make copies of an article and distribute them as long as they are for personal use.
I used to work at a large scientific publishers - as far as I know they would have no problem with you providing pdfs of one of their articles to an opponent in a debate.
You would not be permitted to post a link to a pdf that is hosted on a server not owned by the publisher. but you would be permitted to send a single copy of a pdf by email to somebody who you are debating on a web forum related to biological issues.
Obviously, you can't send pdfs to anybody who asks for them. But if your opponent complains that s/he cannot access an article that is central to your argument, it is within you rights to send a copy to that person.
Mick
added in edit: As far as I know, you are almost always permitted to reproduce scientific data that may be central to your argument. if the paper you want to cite contains a table of data you can reproduce that data to your heart's content. You CANNOT just scan the table and post the image on the web. But you can extract data from the table and post your own analysis of that data freely.
In practice, this means that you can reproduce published scientific results, as long as you don't simply copy the data tables and graphs from an article. Instead, extract the data, generate your own graphs and tables, and post those.
This message has been edited by mick, 05-11-2005 02:19 PM
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