There are so many ways! I found some while looking on Reddit and thanks to all the academic folks out there calling B$ on paywalled research.
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Hi, I’m Isabella Bruno. I currently lead Learning and Community within Smithsonian’s Office of Digital Transformation, but I’ve loved learning and the process of learning my whole life. I made this because I'm so lucky to have access to journals and research, despite not being a full-time researcher or curator. I use academic resources ALOT, and I particularly love consensus.ai
I wanted to compile resources for people who don't have institutional affiliation, as there are many other ways that you can get research access.
Help me refine/update/improve this page by:
via isabella.f.bruno (a) g m a i l . c o m
Disclaimer: This is a personal project, not affiliated or endorsed by Smithsonian Institution. I describe my role in order to offer context to who I am and I am not speaking in any official capacity on this page. Capisce?
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Google with “Title of the paper” filetype: pdf
It’s an academic social media network, where the researchers themselves post their article via pdf. It’s worked especially for escaping paywalls for the same article on Pubmed and such.
OA.mg is a search engine for academic papers, specialising in Open Access. We have over 250 million papers in our index.
Before formal publication in a scholarly journal, scientific and medical articles are traditionally certified by “peer review.” In this process, the journal’s editors take advice from various experts—called “referees”—who have assessed the paper and may identify weaknesses in its assumptions, methods, and conclusions. Typically, a journal will only publish an article once the editors are satisfied that the authors have addressed referees’ concerns and that the data presented support the conclusions drawn in the paper.
Because this process can be lengthy, authors use the bioRxiv service to make their manuscripts available as “preprints” before certification by peer review, allowing other scientists to see, discuss, and comment on the findings immediately. Readers should therefore be aware that articles on bioRxiv have not been finalized by authors, might contain errors, and report information that has not yet been accepted or endorsed in any way by the scientific or medical community.
PaperPanda is a Chrome extension that uses some clever logic and the Panda’s detective skills to find you the research paper PDFs you need. Essentially, when you activate PaperPanda it finds the DOI of the paper from the current page, and then goes and searches for it. It starts by querying various Open Access repositories like OpenAccessButton, OaDoi, SemanticScholar, Core, ArXiV, and the Internet Archive. You can also set your university libraries domain in the settings (this feature is in the works and coming soon). PaperPanda will then automatically search for the paper through your library. You can also set a different custom domain in the settings.
arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
Alma mater
Your degree-granting institution(s) may have something in place where alumni can have a library account with on-site and electronic access, including access to JSTOR and other digital resources. Depending on your institution, there may be a fee here, but it's likely to be less than a personal JSTOR account.
Some institutions offer an unpaid affiliate position which gives your email address and access to their resources.
Local library
Reach out to friends and colleagues who do still have institutional access and ask for particular articles or chapters.
Contact the authors to request a pdf of the article. They don't make money from JSTOR or any of these publisher websites.
Sometimes you might not get a response. This is because early-career researchers (who do most of the hard work) are the most likely to reply, but the corresponding author (i.e. the author with the email address on the paper) is most likely faculty and their inboxes will often be far too full to respond to these requests. The sad reality is that you're probably not going to get a response if you're emailing a senior academic. 100% agree. Also, unless the paper just dropped, there's no guarantee that any of the authors are still at that institution. Academic job security is a fantasy and researchers change institutions often, so a lot of those emails are going off into the aether.
Wikipedia gives free JSTOR access to certain editors
The catch is that you'd have to sink quite a bit of time into editing Wikipedia articles (although your edits can be very minor).
Unpaywall finds the kind of articles you'd see in peer-reviewed scholarly journals like Science or PLOS One, plus pre-publication versions of similar work from preprint repositories like arXiv. Specifically, it looks for articles with a kind of identifier called a DOI. Although the best-known type of paywall is the kind in front of a newspaper or magazine article you want to read, Unpaywall doesn't help with sites like nytimes.com or washingtonpost.com.
JSTOR actually allows access to 100 free articles each month for regular accounts, according to this post:Â https://www.tumblr.com/jstor/707887744481886208/jstor-is-a-nonprofit