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Comment by NY_Entrepreneur | Hacker News Reader

"Direct action" to find "hidden" papers? Visit a university library. Done.

Only works if you're a student there, they are no usually open to the public.

In the US and Canada, at least, they usually are open to the public.

I don't know about that. Thinking about the four universities I've got experience with, the only one that didn't have someone checking IDs at the door of the library was the small one that probably couldn't afford it.

In my experience, in Boston, nobody will bat an eye if you go into most libraries at MIT (so long as you don't go breaking into wiring closets) or BU. Harvard is very restrictive because it'd probably be overrun with tourists otherwise. I think libraries in big cities (NYC) tend to be more exclusive, to keep out the riff-raff and homeless people, but such cities usually have good public research libraries.

In Toronto, the the UofT libraries are accessible to anybody. However, I did once get kicked out of the Law Society of Upper Canada library when I mixed up Osgoode Hall with the Osgoode Hall law school when I was doing research for a high school class, and I'm still bitter about that.

So maybe the overall answer is that whether a school has people checking IDs depends less on rational decisions and more on their history—have they had trouble, have they had paranoid management, that sort of thing.

From my experience (in Poland), university libraries are open for whoever wants to use them. My department does not even care whether people who attend classes are actually students of my department -- as long as there are free chairs and desks, you're welcome to attend almost any course. If you talk about it with dean and professor responsible for the course, you can even pass it this way, so that if you actually enroll in some degree program in future, you don't need to do it again. I actually have friends who passed courses on my university when they were in high school.

Here in Sweden, while the libraries are open to the public, you need to be a student or faculty to get an account to access journal databases.

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