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Comment by nraynaud | Hacker News Reader

I just came here to say that accessing papers is a pain in the butt when you're not an academic. I've not been near an university in the last decade (I hated my time there as a student, I leave them alone now), but I need access to some papers for my personal projects. I resort to begging people in the academic field to send me papers, you can't pay 45€ a paper you don't even know if it will be useful, I read 10s of them. And, even worse, this high price doesn't even pays the authors. A music album costs 10€ and the author gets all his money out of it plus you can listen to it on youtube to decide before buying.

Academics tend to cite papers for completely different reasons than for implementation, but you don't know if a paper will be useful for implementation or not from the title.

edit: and I couldn't find an option in scholar.google.com to filter only the free to view articles.

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Despite having what seems to be a reasonable level of access via my university subscription, I too sometimes have the same problem, especially for older papers.

Some online resources I quite like for this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/scholar - paper requests fulfilled by people who happen to have access

http://www.libgen.org/ - large collection of scientific articles (and other literature), searchable by DOI

http://www.sci-hub.org/ - proxy service for accessing publisher collections; very unreliable though

Hope this helps with your research!

See also the Twitter hashtag #icanhazpdf

I didn't find that method helpful, but I guess YMMV.

thanks

Well there are pirate proxies; the fact that they even exists is indicative of how broken things are

What are the names of these proxies?

> What are the names of these proxies?

http://diyhpl.us/wiki/articles

Many thanks

Have you looked at DeepDyve [1]?

[1] http://www.deepdyve.com

nope it didn't turn up in my google search. I generally google the title, when I get desperate I google title+"pdf", it has never worked so far, but I keep being hopeful.

"We will begin billing your Payment Method for monthly membership fees at the end of the free trial period of your membership unless you cancel prior to the end of the free trial period". I guess I will not sign up.

That's only for the Professional Membership trial. Select the Freelancer Membership. Since the Freelancer Membership is free, they do not ask for any payment information.

That gives you free "5 minute rentals", which are designed to let you decide if you want to actually rent a given article. If you decide to rent some articles, and so need to pay for that, you'll then have to give payment information, of course.

The rentals are for 30 days, and are sold in packs of 5 rentals for $20. Yes, free would be better, but compared to the alternative of paying $20-40 per article to buy single article access from major journals, DeepDyve looks like a great bargain for the researcher who does not have access to a university library.

I personally have always found DeepDyve to be kinda pointless, as when you need to go back and refresh your memory before citing the article later, your access has expired.

Hi there, I'm an engineer at DeepDyve. I'm wondering how long your rental was for - was it a 30 day rental? And was 30 days too short to cite the article later? I'll talk to some people here, but we may be able to extend that period pretty easily.

Either the fees are hidden on the site or I need more coffee.

They are somewhat covered in the FAQ, linked to from the bottom of the page. Some excerpts:

-------------

The Freelancer Plan is a free plan with the option to purchase $20 packs which allows you to rent any 5 articles for up to 1 year from the start of the plan. Once an article has been rented, it can be read as often as you like until its expiration in 30 days. Any pre-paid rentals that remain unused after 1 year will become void.

-------------

The Professional Plan is $40 per month and entitles you to "virtually" unlimited rentals each month, i.e. you can rent up to 40 articles per month and/or purchase and download up to 40 PDFs per month for a 20% discount. If you need even more access, please contact us because you are extraordinary!

-------------

5-minute rentals are a great way to scan through any rentable article, for free. You get to read the complete full-text of an article in your browser for 5 minutes.

You can do as many 5-minute rentals as you want for free-- just not the same article twice in the same day. Rental tokens are available for unlimited rental access to the articles for 30 days.

Copying, printing, and downloading aren't included with 5-minute rentals.

I would gladly skim 40 articles a month. I guess I skim more like 400 internet pages a day, these don't include a lot of scientific paper because it's a pain in the butt to find them (you have to look for them, you never stumble on them), but there's no reason I would not skim 100-200 on month if they where as common as normal webpages.

after a bit of clicking, I had a banner saying $40/month for unlimited

search for "filetype:pdf"

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=filetype%3Apdf

wonderful, thanks

There's a filter in Mendeley's research catalog: http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/search/?query=%22cat... for showing only open access papers.

(disclaimer: my employer)

Emailing the authors also works. They generally like to see humans express interest in their work and emailing you a PDF requires minimal effort on their part. Many publishing contracts will also let them publish a full article PDF on their personal website.

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