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Comment by elvirs | Hacker News Reader

you don't have to be a student or pay the university to use the library.

You have obviously never been to Harvard, where in fact you do.

(You can also work at Harvard and get a library card as a perk. I often contemplate this fact.)

The good news is that MIT has a much more awesome library and you can, in fact, turn up in person at MIT as a civilian and read copies of Nature. Of course, you have to make the time to do that. The parking is tricky, so you'd best ride the train.

Even in the Boston area I have yet to find a neighborhood library with a Nature subscription.

If, in fact, you know where I can legally get access to, say, the Nature and Science journals without either paying hundreds of dollars a year or physically traveling to the local college library please, please paste the instructions here.

ok this is what you do: you go to the library only once, get a membership card and a username/password for electronic use. and use that username/password to access electronic resources of that library from anywhere. i hope this helps. edit:grammar.

Harvard, for one, doesn't let you do that. You can't even get into most of their library buildings without an ID.

Can you name some academic libraries that offer free membership cards to the general public that enable web access to journals? I've never heard of this, and the institutions I am personally familiar with certainly don't allow this. At the closest three universities to where I am now, a library card for the public costs $500-$1000 a year. This was also the case in other cities I have lived in. If there are research libraries for which this is not the case I would love to know about them. Obviously from your post you have found some, so if you would name them it would help others.

The membership card my local university library offers to the general public does not allow remote access to any electronic resources. You have to be a student or employee to get that.

Disagree. With the move towards electronic articles, one needs a login to access the computers at the library or to read the articles.

Sorry. :(

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