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Comment by 0x20cowboy | Hacker News Reader

Please correct me if I just haven’t found the right place, but when I’ve tried to read academic papers in the past I found I’d have to pay upwards of $50.00 to read anything more than just the abstract.

Is there a site that gives free access to these research papers?

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Some conferences are open access and the materials are freely available.

Anything USENIX falls into this category. In my area (networking/distributed/operating systems) the other (non-USENIX) major venues are also open access (SOSP and SIGCOMM).

sci-hub, but generally most papers are available from the authors' websites, or a preprint server like ArXiv or IACR ePrint

The best source is usually authors' websites. You can find a free copy of just about any modern CS paper by googling its title in quotes with "filetype:pdf".

$200 a year gives you ACM membership with free access to the DL library (amongst other things including a monthly hardcopy of communications of the ACM). Great value IMHO.

Asking the author(s) for a copy (by writing a short mail to them) does also often work, if there is no other free source available :D

Here is my kettle logic for you to not even try getting around that paywall:

Old papers that are not publicly accessible on the web are very likely just a pile of craps and not worth reading; even if it was worth reading, its information should have been compiled in better ways in textbooks/blog posts; if neither were applicable, then you are supposed to be some researcher working in academia and can ask your institute to offer the access.

Short answer: scihub

Email the authors.

Authors put free copies on their websites.

arxiv.org

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