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Comment by ma2rten | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's only my field of research, but I'd say that scientific articles ARE essentially free. If I search for an articles on Google Scholar in 95% of the cases there is a link next it that says "download pdf". When that is not the case, I simply log in my university VPN and can download it anyway (at least from my point of view). I've never paid for a scientific article in my life.

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I simply log in my university VPN...

So in your country does everybody get a taxpayer-sponsored university VPN for life? Or are you speaking from the highly privileged position of "current university student in a well-funded school?"

In any case, it shows a tremendous impoverishment of imagination to claim that Google Scholar is equivalent to an actual free market in research. I want the footnotes in publication A to be directly hyperlinked to the relevant sections of their associated references. Otherwise we remain in the position where random TV shows on Wikipedia have better public documentation than our taxpayer-funded research.

I'll put your 95% assertion to the test and report back.

Paper #1: field: applied physics

Appl. Phys. Lett. 76, 1095 (2000)

Result: no free link on Scholar. I can buy a copy for $29, or there's a new service called "Deepdyve" that will "rent" me a 24-hour glimpse at the paper for $2, no printing allowed.

Papers 2 to 20ish: works by the late Judah Folkman, field: cancer research

Here we have better luck; maybe 50% of the (very well-known) works on the first two pages of this search have free PDFs:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=J+folkman&...

Still not feeling the 95%, though. Of course, I may not have worked in the right fields. This is a big reason why I switched to software, after all.

Well, physics is an exception. The preprints at arxiv.org are free and contain essentially everything.

Medicine, though - that's a problem.

You don't see a problem because you actually have a subscription to these journals -- via your university. During the school year most of the time I have the same experience -- all articles are freely available when I sit in a library or in my room in students' dormitory. Then the summer holidays come, and bam, my head hits the paywall. It annoys me like hell.

The prices are so ridiculously high because they're not aimed at the single consumers -- they're aimed at the universities, which are (barely but still) able afford that.

Not being associated with a university anymore, Google Scholar saves me about ~70% of the time too. However, many of those links aren't legitimate (i.e., licensed) you see a lot of links like http://dept.example.edu/~prof/BIO332/resources/paper.pdf .

Glad they're out there, but it would nice to not depend on grey-market servers.

These links are often legitimate. Even Elsevier lets authors post their own articles on their own sites.

But I agree that this is not a good solution to the bigger problem.

I'm lowly author four on a paper published in an Elsevier journal (American Journal of Human Genetics). I submitted a request to redistribute it on my personal site. It took less than a week for them to grant it.

Easy to do, but I shouldn't have had to ask in the first place.

I can also access some of them via my school. But for instance for SpringerLink and ACM we only have access to recent material and I sometimes want to read stuff I don't have access to even through my school.

Anyway, schools and universities really have a lot of better stuff to do with their money than paying thieves.

A lot of scholars will put a pdf on their personal website knowing that google scholar will link to it.

The university VPN thing: yeah, its just awesome that we limit access to research to people who are attending a university...

Often those are draft copies that are usually very good but occasionally you'll hit one where there's an error corrected in the final version but still in there. Or figures are missing. Etc.

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