The Price of Knowledge. | hubris

"There is a debate raging at the moment surrounding the practice of hiding research behind paywalls. The controversy lies not least in that many argue that scientific research should be free and accessible to all, and that monetising it is counterproductive/unethical. But the fact that the scientists that conduct the research are not paid once their work has been accepted and published, highlights a strange model that favours the journals alone. I’m not going to get into debates about impact factors and that journals also have running costs. There are plenty of points on both sides of these arguments and the debate is easily found on the web. Instead I’m going to point you, the reader, to approaches used in accessing paywalled papers. This is simply an academic collection/cataloguing of approaches that people are currently using to bypass paywalls. Disclaimer: The sci-hub site is currently being challenged in courts in America and I don’t necessarily advocate using this approach. I’m merely demonstrating how people get around paywalls when their university cannot afford the licence fees etc. Here is a piece on the origins of the sci-hub site etc. : http://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science The following is a list of approaches I’ve discovered online that people use to bypass scientific journal paywalls ..."