Academic Resources: A PSA

[Lilias]

Something that anyone doing research would want to know:

[midnightblack]

Yup. I find it to be a rather miserable money-making scheme for some clever people. Scientific research is typically state-funded, and the scientists are paid from the grants that they secure with their research proposals. The referees of peer-reviewed journals aren't actually payed for the evaluation of submitted manuscripts. The already funded by tax-payers research is hidden behind a pay-wall either in the form a pay-per-article price or a submission fee for a journal that can get rather astronomical. I was reading some time ago a complaint coming from several of the world's top universities, stating that they could no longer afford the ridiculous submission fees for journal access that had simply sky-rocketed. Meanwhile, multi-millionaire publishers complain about how difficult and costly it is to maintain an on-line journal that, server maintenance aside, is for the most part reviewed and edited through volunteer or automated work.  ::)

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say this here, so feel free to delete this bit if breaks E.'s rules, but there are several portals that are specialized in what is essentially the pirating of scientific literature. While I don't condone this behavior for typical copyrighted material, in this case I find it to be simply nonsense. I've been in the situation where I couldn't access my own articles because the government didn't have money to cover the submission fees of the journals where they were published in final form. <.<

Open access will probably be the future (unless they corrupt it in a horrible way), but it isn't a full solution yet, as a lot of open-access stuff out there is quite dubious, and generally the scientific community will steer clear of journals lacking established prestige. Not that 'established' publishing houses wouldn't put the weirdest garbage out there up for the most unethical reasons (like pharmaceutical journals publishing favorable research funded by pharmaceutical companies  ::) ), but that's another sad story.

[Sain]

You can also get many academic papers for free (completely legally also) through Google Scholar. When you find the article click the "All X versions" button on the lower right corner. That usually displays at least a few sources for the .pdf If not then one of them may have the full text version on the html page anyway.

[midnightblack]

Good call. Also, sometimes you can just use arxiv for a preprint.

[stormwyrm]

Elsevier and these other academic publishers are parasites upon science. They don’t pay people to do peer review (which is generally done gratis by scientists who consider it part of their duty), they don’t funnel their profits as grants to fund more research (in fact, they charge exorbitant fees to universities and other research institutions for subscriptions to their journals). In fact, they basically contribute nothing genuinely useful to the enterprise of scientific publishing. It is basically only inertia and the reputation of the journals they control that keeps them alive. As someone who does plenty of technical research it is frustrating to no end to find access to research articles blocked by paywalls.

There’s that sad story of Aaron Swartz who was basically hounded to death after he used MIT’s access to JSTOR to download and make available to the public a large number of journal articles. The overzealous prosecutor basically threw the book at him, piling whatever charges she thought might be relevant, until the pressure of his impending trial drove the poor guy to suicide.