Free Access To Journals
I want to build an indexing engine, just for fun. In order to do so I need to learn how, this is proving difficult, I can’t seem to construct a particularly good google search. Eventually I found a promising abstract, but I can’t view the full paper unless I pay for it. I’m fairly appalled, science shouldn’t have corporate mentality when it comes to the spread of information.
I’m hoping the blame is that of the journals who publish the papers. My limited experience as a scientist would suggest that.
On matters of website usability, I would pay for the thing, but in order to even find out how much it would cost I have to register with the site, and that requires me to fill out a form with 20 fields! I can’t be arsed to register with yet-another-site, just to find out they want 30 quid for a paper.
Unfortunately I can’t seem to find a free download accidently left on some university server.
The problem with free access to scientific journals is that it is not cheap to put a journal together - unlike a standard magazine, you have to have each article peer reviewed, carefully checked etc, and after all that your audience is likely to be limited to people working in a very specific field. That is why most journals don’t offer free copies of the papers they publish, and can charge upwards of the price of a cheap book for a single paper.
One way to get round this is to go to your local university library - most allow guests, though you probably won’t be able to borrow books - and will have copies of most journals available that you can read.
PS Any chance of having your spam-trap recognise “No” as a valid answer or giving humans a hint?
Thanks for the comment. I can’t help but feel that the whole process could be made plenty cheaper somehow. But yes, capitalism got us here, I spose I must respect that the fundamentals apply to everything, even science.
Thanks for the tip on the captcha, strToLower() required! Silly mistake of mine, although I long for a language where such mistakes cannot occur.