Academic papers

[tux3do]

From which sites can I get academic papers? (Im not affiliated with university anymore)

[SeijiSensei]

For free? Not very easy. Most of the sites are run by the academic publishers who want you to spend $20-40 for just one article. Some journals seem to be moving toward "open-access" policies, but it varies from journal to journal even from the same publisher. You can try searching at https://scholar.google.com/ and see what comes up. Most of the time the abstracts are free, but the full-text articles are not. Sometimes if you search ordinary Google for an article by title, you might come across earlier versions of the piece on the authors' or others' sites. Sometimes an article will have been scanned into PDF as part of someone's course readings and show up in searches.

JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org/) is another good place to search, but I think access to the full-texts requires a university connection.

The NSF (http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=127043) began a program to expand public access to the research it funds. It has always irked me that research funded with public monies was not automatically free for public viewing. The publishers have fought this trend tooth and nail, but I think they are on the losing side in the long run. Journals cover their costs from subscription sales to academic libraries. Charging me $30 to read an article on line is largely a method to increase profits.

[tux3do]

Thanks! I did not know about NSF.


Charging me $30 to read an article on line is largely a method to increase profits.
The payment method is also complicated, too much troubles to pay with visa or pay pal. It does not look like they accept bitcoin yet. Come to think of it, I may be able to email and pay scientist directly with bitcoin.

[SeijiSensei]

I highly doubt Elsevier or Wiley will accept bitcoin now or any time in the foreseeable future. I'm not even sure what the future of bitcoin will be after the Mt.Gox collapse.

[monkeybrain20122]

Well depends on the disciplines. A lot of preprints in math and physics can be accessed and downloaded for free at http://arxiv.org/, I think the biologists might have finally come up with something similar (I have read it somewhere, but I am not sure) I doubt that there is anything like that in the social sciences. Interestingly the spirit of open source is most evident among mathematicians and physicists. :)

[mJayk]

+1 for the arxiv.org

[bapoumba]

Well depends on the disciplines. A lot of preprints in math and physics can be accessed and downloaded for free at http://arxiv.org/, I think the biologists might have finally come up with something similar (I have read it somewhere, but I am not sure) I doubt that there is anything like that in the social sciences. Interestingly the spirit of open source is most evident among mathematicians and physicists. :)

http://biorxiv.org/