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.
My previous uni gives access to alumni for life, so I can access journals for free from wherever.
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 [1] http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GNP.PCAP.CD/countries...
However, if you were fortunate enough to attend a college that does have access, you should take advantage of it.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, that great privilege was revoked when I stopped paying tuition (aka graduated).
Huh. Need to check on this, thanks. That said I hope sci-hub succeeds.