3 ms·

I'm currently working on my PhD and I'm familiar with this list and site. In my field at least (geoscience), there are very very few high-quality journals on th

I'm currently working on my PhD and I'm familiar with this list and site. In my field at least (geoscience), there are very very few high-quality journals on this list. The available journals basically fall into two categories: extremely specific ("Vadose Zone Journal") or outside the mainstream ("Mongolian Geoscientist"). While I wish it were different, there is basically no incentive to publish in any of the journals in my field unless your research matches one of the extremely specific journals. I hate publishers probably far more than the average person (I love paying $2,500 out of my grant to get a paper published, only for the production team that has been outsourced to India botch the file conversion, put it online without my approval, and ghost me for two months!), but few serious academics in my department would consider any of these. Prestige can charge a premium, and without prestige your career is a non-starter sadly.

Terretta 5y ago
To your point, the flip side as a consumer of academic white papers, is where can I go to get everything in an individual hobbyist subscription pricing? I want one subscription for all of gate-kept STEM (or maybe one each for tech, for engineering and math, and one for science and medicine), then be able to just link and read as though using Zotero, Mendeley, or Papers but with access to all the things. As a corporation, journal subscriptions are nominal relative to, say, Gartner. For academics, you're covered in budgets. But for oneself as an individual, I cannot find a reasonable source.
- periheli0n 5y ago
  You can always email the authors for a copy. Most will be happy to share. Also, preprints are getting ever more common. Manuscripts get uploaded to preprint servers like Arxiv.org before being peer reviewed, and usually updated with the peer reviewed version once accepted in a subscription journal.
  - OmicronCeti 5y ago
    Some journals are trying to capture that space too, many are developing their own pre-print servers for who knows what reason.
- OmicronCeti 5y ago
  >is where can I go to get everything in an individual hobbyist subscription pricing? No. Many of the journals listed will have some OA papers, while other papers will be paywalled. There are few journals (like Nature) that are entirely free to read sadly. https://sci-hub.ee/ https://sci-hub.ee/ is the way. Just give it a DOI and you're good to go.
- input_sh 5y ago
  I feel no shame in using Sci-Hub and neither should you. Peer reviewers aren't paid with your money, and neither are the writers. You're only paying the middlemen with the subscription or without it. Fuck them. If it's not on Sci-Hub (happened to me only once), email the author and upload it there afterwards.

Terretta 5y ago

To your point, the flip side as a consumer of academic white papers, is where can I go to get everything in an individual hobbyist subscription pricing? I want one subscription for all of gate-kept STEM (or maybe one each for tech, for engineering and math, and one for science and medicine), then be able to just link and read as though using Zotero, Mendeley, or Papers but with access to all the things. As a corporation, journal subscriptions are nominal relative to, say, Gartner. For academics, you're covered in budgets. But for oneself as an individual, I cannot find a reasonable source.

periheli0n 5y ago
You can always email the authors for a copy. Most will be happy to share. Also, preprints are getting ever more common. Manuscripts get uploaded to preprint servers like Arxiv.org before being peer reviewed, and usually updated with the peer reviewed version once accepted in a subscription journal.
- OmicronCeti 5y ago
  Some journals are trying to capture that space too, many are developing their own pre-print servers for who knows what reason.
OmicronCeti 5y ago
>is where can I go to get everything in an individual hobbyist subscription pricing? No. Many of the journals listed will have some OA papers, while other papers will be paywalled. There are few journals (like Nature) that are entirely free to read sadly. https://sci-hub.ee/ https://sci-hub.ee/ is the way. Just give it a DOI and you're good to go.
input_sh 5y ago
I feel no shame in using Sci-Hub and neither should you. Peer reviewers aren't paid with your money, and neither are the writers. You're only paying the middlemen with the subscription or without it. Fuck them. If it's not on Sci-Hub (happened to me only once), email the author and upload it there afterwards.