8 Ways Journalists Can Access Academic Research for Free | Hacker News Reader

8 Ways Journalists Can Access Academic Research for Free

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68 pointswarrenm35 comments

Wikipedia has a program for established editors (with 10+ edits the last month) to access journals through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Librar...

Reporters straight up don't have time to edit that much unfortunately. It's a grueling, underpaid and under appreciated job. Most aren't senior reporters at The NY Times (and even then... it's not as good pay as you'd expect).

Elephant in the room is missing as the author must know.

Sci-Hub is sparse for recent articles in certain notorious high profile journals. Authors are getting better about coughing funds to pay for open access at publication.

Yes, asking for reprint is still highly effective.

Also, annas-archive. Has Literally millions of science articles (including the ones from Sci-Hub) all preserved on there along with books. Definitely better then Google Scholar imo.

First time I hear about it. Are they likely to stay online, has there been any challenges?

> Definitely better then Google Scholar imo.

It’s not at all in the same niche as Google Scholar. GS is a search engine to legitimate sources for scientific articles. It’s about finding where the articles are, not about getting the articles themselves.

Re: all the mentions of Sci-Hub, I assume the organization intends to keep a professional image and avoid legal trouble, so they won't just come out and say "just pirate it". Plenty of institutions consider the use of Sci-Hub as misconduct. (I'm just presenting the stance, not defending it, if not clear.)

can you name and shame

Sci-Hub (scientific articles)

Library Genesis (Nonfiction & fiction books, scientific articles, mass-market magazines)

Z-Library (Books, articles)

annas-archive (Books, articles)

Out-of-copyright / open-access materials can be found through the Internet Archive / Open Library, Project Gutenberg, and Standard Ebooks (latter drawing mostly from the former). Preprints can be found on preprint servers such as ArXiv and SSRN.

My personal favorite? #2: "Ask"

It is truly astonishing what you can get when you ask (of course, the answer could be "no", but asking is free - why not do it?)

May be field dependent but unfortunately the most likely outcome is the authors never getting back to you.

Not my experience, and I do this regularly. Scientists are often happy when people are interested in their research.

Many authors I'm interested in are dead.

Asks are rarely answered.

in this case, the article does suggest asking the journal for a free account - not directly to the authors (that's #6)

For me, it's the latency. If I'm researching something, I want to read the papers right then so that I can build off of them to do my next round of searches, instead of waiting for stuff to (maybe) trickle in. With scihub, I can do the search-read-search cycle in a matter of minutes rather than waiting hours/days for emails to be replied to.

> it's the latency

Journalists are often on deadline.

On the other hand, journalists are also those who would benefit the most from some direct interaction with the authors. The vast majority of them don’t have anywhere near the background necessary to actually understand the articles.

maybe those journalists shouldn't be the ones covering the papers then

> I want to read the papers right then so that I can build off of them to do my next round of searches

I want to read the papers right then so I can figure out if they're actually totally irrelevant or even just garbage, and delete them and move on.

I have never heard about a researcher who would not provide an article when asked, ever. Most of them would also be happy to discuss the content of the articles, how they can be replicated and whether they are still accurate.

It does have more friction and latency than a search engine, though.

What if the researcher is dead?

If all you need to do is read an article (but not download), you can register for a free acount with jstor that allows you to read 100 articles a month:

https://www.jstor.org/register?redirectUri=%2F

I have jstor access elsewhere (through a school) which allows me to actually download pdfs, but it doesn't carry all the journals that going straight through jstor does. And often I just need a single result from a paper or the article is short, and reading online without downloading is fine.

arxiv.org is best if the article is recent and available there.

Journals published by professional societies sometimes have free access - e.g. some, but not all, of the American Mathematical Society journals. Go to the organization's web site and search the journal there.

If you know the author(s) of the paper and they're still active, a search on the author(s) will often turn up faculty web pages with download links. I've found that it's useful to search (ddg, google, etc.) on the author + title of the book/paper, as opposed to going to a site that aggregates works and then searching, because a given site might not have that book/paper. I've often found books, for instance, that were not on places like Project Gutenberg.

Another article with a different round-up of resources:

'You’re a Researcher Without a Library: What Do You Do?' - https://medium.com/a-wikipedia-librarian/youre-a-researcher-...

Some universities, especially public ones, may offer library privileges for relatively low costs.

0. sci-hub.st / libgen.is

My usual go-to is to use Sci-Hub but that database hasn't been updated in a long time so I've switched over to Nexus Search. Chrome and Firefox extension here: https://github.com/aokellermann/nexus-now

Often a preprint can be found on arxiv.org, SSRN (for social science research), or searching "pdf <article title>". My local public library has obtained published papers for me on a few occasions.

No love for Sci-Hub?

Came here to say the same thing. Just use SciHub.

Looks like it's covertly suggested in #5

    5. Install Browser Extensions

    Browser extensions can help you check the web for free versions of academic articles. 
    The Unpaywallbrowser extension gathers content from more than 50,000 journals and open-access repositories worldwide. 
    The Open Access Button searches “millions of articles” from sources that include “all of the aggregated repositories 
    in the world, hybrid articles, open access journals, and those on authors’ personal pages,” according to its website.

    If the Open Access Button does not find free versions of the articles you’re looking for, it will contact the authors and
    ask them to share their work by putting it into an open access repository.

suggest it to the article author :)

I suspect the oversight is intentional. The other methods are uncontroversial. The mention of the OA button is a nod to it, without going into the arguments over Sci-Hub's legality.

How is it a nod to scihub?

There's a sci-hub now browser extension.

But that is not the two extensions being recommend. On the contrary the two extensions are ones that tries to respect copyright.

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