A legal alternative to academic publishing paywalls | MetaFilter

Some other sources of, or methods for, obtaining free academic content include: * DOAJ: the Directory of Open Access Journals. * OpenDOAR: the Directory of Open Access Repositories. * DOAB: the Directory of Open Access Books. * Google Scholar, where some results include a link to a free PDF. * Of legal dispute, Sci-Hub, an online search engine with over 58 million academic papers and articles available for direct download, bypassing publisher paywalls. * Similarly, Library Genesis offers access to more than 52 million articles from about 50,000 publications. * The Open Access Button. * Preprint archives, such as arXiv for mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology, statistics, and quantitative finance, and bioRxiv for the biological sciences. * Social networking sites which focus on paper sharing, such as academia.edu or researchgate.net (some are spam or legally problematic). * JURN: a free and no-ad online search tool for the finding and downloading of free full-text scholarly works. * Various online search engines e.g. FreeFullPDF of variable quality. Alternately... * Emailing the article/paper author, politely asking if they know of an alternative or free location where you can obtain the work. * Tweeting ICanHazPDF (note: makes it public that you may be engaging in illegal activity). * Asking your friendly local librarian (academic or public) who may have knowledge of other techniques or sources."