What are examples of closed-source information that are low-hanging fruit in terms of access (e.g. academic journals)?
On the topic of academic journals: I’m graduating from college next year and I want to maintain access to journals without going to grad school immediately. If I were to pay for journal access myself, it would cost me about $20,000 a year to sustain my current reading habits. I’d like to cut that down to below $10,000 (strictly legally).
I’ve only come up with two options so far:
Convince a university library or department to sponsor me and give me remote access to the university network.
Enroll at a college that has good journal subscriptions and cheap tuition (and provides VPN or EZproxy access to students who never arrive on campus...). Do any of the colleges offering online degrees give network access?
I hope option 1 works out. Are there other options for cheap, legal journal access?
As far as I know at my own university the official alumni organisation provides alumni with the ability to VPN/proxy over the university.
http://www.deepdyve.com/ is also worth a look if you don’t have access to a university. A free account allows you to view journal articles for five minutes. There also a 40$/month professional plan that gives you longer access to 40 articles per month.
You could also pay a student to be able to use his VPN. I don’t know the legalities of it. It might be illegal. There might also be different laws in different countries.
As far as I know at my own university the official alumni organisation provides alumni with the ability to VPN/proxy over the university.
That’s a prety good investment if I can enroll at a university that offers VPN for alumni. My university doesn’t let alumni access the network, and I think from a quick search that most US univerities don’t because of license restrictions. I’ll check out universities in other countries.
http://www.deepdyve.com/ is also worth a look if you don’t have access to a university. A free account allows you to view journal articles for five minutes. There also a 40$/month professional plan that gives you longer access to 40 articles per month.
Nice! This will be useful right now, so thanks for mentioning it. Unfortuntely, their journal selection is limited compared to a university library, and paper downloads are only 20% off the publisher price (and limited to 40 papers per month). I think I’ll try contacting them for custom bulk download plans.
You could also pay a student to be able to use his VPN. I don’t know the legalities of it. It might be illegal. There might also be different laws in different countries.
Account sharing is not allowed at my university, and I think most schools in the US don’t allow it.
There’s also the Less Wrong help desk. Both are useful, but it takes time for a person to process requests, and neither are suitable for high-frequency requests.
Are there other options for cheap, legal journal access?
I found that Google works well. It’s rare that I find an article I want to read and can’t find somewhere—maybe on the author’s web page, maybe copied to some public directory, maybe someplace else. If everything else fails and you really need it, the authors are usually happy to email you a copy upon request.
I found that Google works well. It’s rare that I find an article I want to read and can’t find somewhere—maybe on the author’s web page, maybe copied to some public directory, maybe someplace else.
For you, perhaps. But for me… Well, I host 580 PDFs on gwern.net because they are not otherwise available publicly, and I link to >865 external PDFs (37 of which are Internet Archive or Dropbox, and would not be indexed in Google). So that’s easily a third of the articles which I use somewhere, I cannot simply find it online easily.
I agree, papers are often publicly available somewhere indexed by Google, but I think that happens for less than half the papers I access.
If everything else fails and you really need it, the authors are usually happy to email you a copy upon request.
That’s a good point! However, authors are sometimes slow to respond, and most authors die (or, less drastically, some lose copies of and access to old papers).
On the topic of academic journals: I’m graduating from college next year and I want to maintain access to journals without going to grad school immediately. If I were to pay for journal access myself, it would cost me about $20,000 a year to sustain my current reading habits. I’d like to cut that down to below $10,000 (strictly legally).
I’ve only come up with two options so far:
Convince a university library or department to sponsor me and give me remote access to the university network.
Enroll at a college that has good journal subscriptions and cheap tuition (and provides VPN or EZproxy access to students who never arrive on campus...). Do any of the colleges offering online degrees give network access?
I hope option 1 works out. Are there other options for cheap, legal journal access?
As far as I know at my own university the official alumni organisation provides alumni with the ability to VPN/proxy over the university.
http://www.deepdyve.com/ is also worth a look if you don’t have access to a university. A free account allows you to view journal articles for five minutes. There also a 40$/month professional plan that gives you longer access to 40 articles per month.
You could also pay a student to be able to use his VPN. I don’t know the legalities of it. It might be illegal. There might also be different laws in different countries.
http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar is a source where you can ask for specific journal articles. But I don’t know the legality of the endevour.
Great suggestions!
That’s a prety good investment if I can enroll at a university that offers VPN for alumni. My university doesn’t let alumni access the network, and I think from a quick search that most US univerities don’t because of license restrictions. I’ll check out universities in other countries.
Nice! This will be useful right now, so thanks for mentioning it. Unfortuntely, their journal selection is limited compared to a university library, and paper downloads are only 20% off the publisher price (and limited to 40 papers per month). I think I’ll try contacting them for custom bulk download plans.
Account sharing is not allowed at my university, and I think most schools in the US don’t allow it.
There’s also the Less Wrong help desk. Both are useful, but it takes time for a person to process requests, and neither are suitable for high-frequency requests.
/r/scholar is actually surprisingly fast on turnaround time. But it is questionably legal.
Some big-city public libraries (New York, Boston etc) have journal subscriptions.
I found that Google works well. It’s rare that I find an article I want to read and can’t find somewhere—maybe on the author’s web page, maybe copied to some public directory, maybe someplace else. If everything else fails and you really need it, the authors are usually happy to email you a copy upon request.
For you, perhaps. But for me… Well, I host 580 PDFs on
gwern.netbecause they are not otherwise available publicly, and I link to >865 external PDFs (37 of which are Internet Archive or Dropbox, and would not be indexed in Google). So that’s easily a third of the articles which I use somewhere, I cannot simply find it online easily.I agree, papers are often publicly available somewhere indexed by Google, but I think that happens for less than half the papers I access.
That’s a good point! However, authors are sometimes slow to respond, and most authors die (or, less drastically, some lose copies of and access to old papers).