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).
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).