With that in mind, this post is an unorganized list of tricks that I have to try and find free copies of articles that you would otherwise have to pay for. This situation is dynamic and if I were to make the list again in another year, it would be different. Just keep in mind that there are no guarantees that any of these will work, but since you're not pay anything for this advice, that comes with the territory.
- Many journal will provide open access within certain time windows. The most common approach is that access is free after 6 months. Examples of this include:
- Science magazine, but only the research articles, not reviews, new stories, brevia, etc.
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- In the other direction, the Institute of Physics makes all their articles available for free for the first 30 days after online publication. This usually means you if you see something in anyway related to your work, grab it right away as it will cost you later.
- Many publishers will make the January issue of the current publishing year open access. This is true for the American Chemical Society and Elsevier.
- Sign up with the journals of interest to receive their emails, such as their Tables of Contents. Every once in a while, they will alert you to free articles as well.
- In a similar vein, other journals have blogs supporting them. A good example of this is the Royal Society of Chemistry, which has individual blogs for each of their journals. If a research article is discussed in their blogs, they will usually make it available for about a month or so.
- A Google Scholar search for an article (I find using a good portion of the title works best) may show alternate mirror sites that have the article available. Look for hits that have a [pdf] annotation.
- More and more professors are providing free copies to their published research via their own websites
- Along these same lines, you can always contact the professors directly and see if they can supply you a copy of the article. This is the least desirable route as you may not get a quick response (or any response).
3 comments:
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"$35 a pop for an article that may or may not be what you are looking for can also be an expensive proposition." - definitely. The price is just too high and you risk not getting what you pay for. Thanks for sharing your tricks John.
You can also use Project Gutenberg for some open source literature.
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