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If you're a student, your university likely has a proxy service that allows you to access journals from anywhere using your credentials. My previous uni gives
by Cyph0n 11y ago
If you're a student, your university likely has a proxy service that allows you to access journals from anywhere using your credentials.
My previous uni gives access to alumni for life, so I can access journals for free from wherever.
- r3bl 11y agoAnd what are people outside of the U.S. supposed to do?
- dfc 11y agoThe GP is a great person to ask that question to in light of the fact that he is a student in UAE. I am curious why you assumed that GP is from the US?
- niels_olson 11y agoLet me guess: Because the spoken language is English and the site has a clearly US-centric culture? Even more specifically, an SV culture. Have you ever seen a housing article about Fresno on the front page? New York? One could argue the bias lacked utility, but it's hardly incriminating.
- sidarape 11y agoI don't think it is unique to the US... I'm in Canada and also have that.
- cyphar 11y agoI'm in Australia and we have the same service. But it is bullshit that academic papers are hidden behind paywalls.
- Cyph0n 11y agoI'm living in the United Arab Emirates. My previous college has subscriptions in most journals. My current institute also has access.
- secure 11y agoAgreed. I studied in Germany, and none of the academic institutions I know of make papers accessible to alumnis. For students, sure, but for alumnis? Never heard of it.
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoThe local hack: get a lifetime membership at the uni computer club. This gets you a shell account on a computer inside the uni network, and Rob's your uncle. Lifetime cost is about $100 here, and that money goes to a good cause.
- krisdol 11y agoMy uni didn't have any of that. YMMV
- peterhuston 11y agoFrom a Norwegian IP you can get access to many medical journals, see http://www.helsebiblioteket.no/om-oss/english http://www.helsebiblioteket.no/om-oss/english. This can be achieved through TOR if you choose only to exit through a node in Norway.
- logicrook 11y agoEven with that, every uni does not subscribe to everything. You can still find important papers behind paywalls. In my uni we had pages-long emails for the lab explaining the different procedures (at least 4, e.g. access with some other proxy, etc) to try to get access to an article before requesting it.
- grendelt 11y agoNot from anywhere. Most major publishers, sure, but some journals are a little esoteric or very specific in their discipline and not part of the main journal subscription collections.
- snake117 11y agoI frequently took advantage of this when I was a student. It was amazing that I could bypass any paywall and get access to all the journals/articles that I needed either for my courses or my own curiosity. Unfortunately, that great privilege was revoked when I stopped paying tuition (aka graduated).
- JabavuAdams 11y ago> My previous uni gives access to alumni for life, so I can access journals for free from wherever. Huh. Need to check on this, thanks. That said I hope sci-hub succeeds.
- alphydan 11y agoWhat about poor countries who can't afford to pay for many subscriptions in the field? Should their scientists be banned from making contributions to science? Spain is not very poor, but when I was doing research in Seville, the department simply could not afford subscriptions to most physics journals, so we had to write directly to the authors with mixed success. How do you think a scientist in Senegal would feel about spending $6,000 [0] for access to a single journal for 5 researchers. If the per-capita GNI is $1,000 [1], the equivalent in the US would be for your university to pay $330,000 for 5 people in your department to read _a single_ journal!! [0] http://store.elsevier.com/product.jsp?issn=03784371 http://store.elsevier.com/product.jsp?issn=03784371 [1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD/countries/SN-ZF-XN?display=graph http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD/countries...
- Cyph0n 11y agoI agree completely. Open access is really the only way to go if we want scientific knowledge to be equally accessible everywhere. However, if you were fortunate enough to attend a college that does have access, you should take advantage of it.
- czr80 11y agoProbably a researcher in Senegal has access through this: http://www.research4life.org/about/ http://www.research4life.org/about/
- alphydan 11y agoI specifically chose the journal above, because it's not included in that initiative. Research4life only gives access to what the first world thinks the third world should concern itself with. Namely <<leading journals and books in the fields of health, agriculture, environment, and applied sciences>>. I think it's a generous initiative, but it misses the point of open access. If you're poor and passionate about math, theoretical physics, or some branches of computer science ... then, sorry, these journals are only for the rich kids.