The problem in academia is that publishing is necessary for a successful career, and the journals with the most prestigious names are not open-source. Academics will generally be more than happy to share their work with you if you can find them and ask for a copy. However, if they want to be successful they have no choice but to try to publish it in a journal that is very likely to be behind gates. This system is terribly corrupt, to my way of thinking: young scholars toil for free, are paid nothing even once they get accepted, and the journals profit off their work by selling it at exorbitant prices to academic universities, where the people cannot read it. My own work is nearly always published in the open sources, which means that I will never be hired by an academic department; but it also means that anyone, anywhere can read it for free.
Here is a list of several ways of getting at academic papers you may be interested in, with a summary of just how legal each method is for anyone concerned about that. To summarize:
How to access papers for free1. Sci-Hub2. Unpaywall3. Open Access Button4. Paper Panda5. 12ft ladder
If you are like me, and occasionally see a story about a paper you'd like to examine for yourself, this may be useful to you.
5 comments:
I didn't know about most of these.
Don't forget libgen for textbooks. Any textbooks. All the textbooks. :D
Thank you greatly.
Maybe they don't *want* the unwashed masses reading the source material for themselves. If we could, why then would we need 'experts' to interpret them for us??
I dunno. The big journals have paid editors, often paying half a professor's salary (the university picking up the other half) for two or more professors for the editorial work, which is substantial. They typically also run a print edition, which costs money.
Many smaller journals don't have a print edition, so they can save there, and there are journals with volunteer editors who work in their spare time.
I have no idea what the profit margins are on any of these journals, but I suspect it isn't much, and probably none for the small journals.
In any case, it's good to have ways for everyone to access these articles, and I wish the big journals had some policy like making everything open after 5 years or something.
On the other hand, I have little sympathy for textbook publishers, although they are necessary. One more resource to add is OpenStax, which provides free textbooks written by experts for many subjects.
It's a project at Rice U. and a good place for teachers who want to save their students money. Everyone can download PDF textbooks for free. They don't have all subjects and seem to focus on the freshman & sophomore levels, but I've used them and been very happy with the work.
If you do use an OpenStax textbook and like video, search for the book on YouTube. I've run across professors who have recorded lectures specifically for various chapters in the OpenStax textbooks, and those have been very useful as well.
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