8 Ways Journalists Can Access Academic Research for Free

https://gijn.org/2023/08/09/8-ways-journalists-access-free-academic-research-journals/

by warrenm • 3 years ago

68 35 3 years ago

gijn.org

JimtheCoder• 3 years ago

No love for Sci-Hub?

idlewords• 3 years ago

Came here to say the same thing. Just use SciHub.

antegamisou2• 3 years ago

Looks like it's covertly suggested in #5

    5. Install Browser Extensions

    Browser extensions can help you check the web for free versions of academic articles. 
    The Unpaywallbrowser extension gathers content from more than 50,000 journals and open-access repositories worldwide. 
    The Open Access Button searches “millions of articles” from sources that include “all of the aggregated repositories 
    in the world, hybrid articles, open access journals, and those on authors’ personal pages,” according to its website.

    If the Open Access Button does not find free versions of the articles you’re looking for, it will contact the authors and
    ask them to share their work by putting it into an open access repository.

warrenm3• 3 years ago

suggest it to the article author :)

cratermoon2• 3 years ago

I suspect the oversight is intentional. The other methods are uncontroversial. The mention of the OA button is a nod to it, without going into the arguments over Sci-Hub's legality.

tokai2• 3 years ago

How is it a nod to scihub?

sva_• 3 years ago

0. sci-hub.st / libgen.is

warrenm3• 3 years ago

My personal favorite? #2: "Ask"

It is truly astonishing what you can get when you ask (of course, the answer could be "no", but asking is free - why not do it?)

antegamisou2• 3 years ago

May be field dependent but unfortunately the most likely outcome is the authors never getting back to you.

hannob• 3 years ago

Not my experience, and I do this regularly. Scientists are often happy when people are interested in their research.

warrenm3• 3 years ago

in this case, the article does suggest asking the journal for a free account - not directly to the authors (that's #6)

generalizations• 3 years ago

For me, it's the latency. If I'm researching something, I want to read the papers right then so that I can build off of them to do my next round of searches, instead of waiting for stuff to (maybe) trickle in. With scihub, I can do the search-read-search cycle in a matter of minutes rather than waiting hours/days for emails to be replied to.

JJMcJ2• 3 years ago

it's the latency

Journalists are often on deadline.

pessimizer2• 3 years ago

I want to read the papers right then so that I can build off of them to do my next round of searches

I want to read the papers right then so I can figure out if they're actually totally irrelevant or even just garbage, and delete them and move on.

kergonath3• 3 years ago

I have never heard about a researcher who would not provide an article when asked, ever. Most of them would also be happy to discuss the content of the articles, how they can be replicated and whether they are still accurate.

It does have more friction and latency than a search engine, though.

pessimizer2• 3 years ago

What if the researcher is dead?

robwwilliams• 3 years ago

Elephant in the room is missing as the author must know.

Sci-Hub is sparse for recent articles in certain notorious high profile journals. Authors are getting better about coughing funds to pay for open access at publication.

Yes, asking for reprint is still highly effective.

archangelsky• 3 years ago

Also, annas-archive. Has Literally millions of science articles (including the ones from Sci-Hub) all preserved on there along with books. Definitely better then Google Scholar imo.

kzrdude2• 3 years ago

First time I hear about it. Are they likely to stay online, has there been any challenges?

kergonath3• 3 years ago

Definitely better then Google Scholar imo.

It’s not at all in the same niche as Google Scholar. GS is a search engine to legitimate sources for scientific articles. It’s about finding where the articles are, not about getting the articles themselves.

elektor• 3 years ago

My usual go-to is to use Sci-Hub but that database hasn't been updated in a long time so I've switched over to Nexus Search. Chrome and Firefox extension here: https://github.com/aokellermann/nexus-now

Bystander22• 3 years ago

Another article with a different round-up of resources:

'You’re a Researcher Without a Library: What Do You Do?' - https://medium.com/a-wikipedia-librarian/youre-a-researcher-...

JJMcJ2• 3 years ago

Some universities, especially public ones, may offer library privileges for relatively low costs.

Bostonian• 3 years ago

Often a preprint can be found on arxiv.org, SSRN (for social science research), or searching "pdf <article title>". My local public library has obtained published papers for me on a few occasions.

dredmorbius2• 3 years ago

Sci-Hub (scientific articles)

Library Genesis (Nonfiction & fiction books, scientific articles, mass-market magazines)

Z-Library (Books, articles)

annas-archive (Books, articles)

Out-of-copyright / open-access materials can be found through the Internet Archive / Open Library, Project Gutenberg, and Standard Ebooks (latter drawing mostly from the former). Preprints can be found on preprint servers such as ArXiv and SSRN.

sigtstp• 3 years ago

Re: all the mentions of Sci-Hub, I assume the organization intends to keep a professional image and avoid legal trouble, so they won't just come out and say "just pirate it". Plenty of institutions consider the use of Sci-Hub as misconduct. (I'm just presenting the stance, not defending it, if not clear.)

kragen2• 3 years ago

can you name and shame

kzrdude2• 3 years ago

Wikipedia has a program for established editors (with 10+ edits the last month) to access journals through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Librar...

cguess• 3 years ago

Reporters straight up don't have time to edit that much unfortunately. It's a grueling, underpaid and under appreciated job. Most aren't senior reporters at The NY Times (and even then... it's not as good pay as you'd expect).

bikenaga• 3 years ago

If all you need to do is read an article (but not download), you can register for a free acount with jstor that allows you to read 100 articles a month:

https://www.jstor.org/register?redirectUri=%2F

I have jstor access elsewhere (through a school) which allows me to actually download pdfs, but it doesn't carry all the journals that going straight through jstor does. And often I just need a single result from a paper or the article is short, and reading online without downloading is fine.

arxiv.org is best if the article is recent and available there.

Journals published by professional societies sometimes have free access - e.g. some, but not all, of the American Mathematical Society journals. Go to the organization's web site and search the journal there.

If you know the author(s) of the paper and they're still active, a search on the author(s) will often turn up faculty web pages with download links. I've found that it's useful to search (ddg, google, etc.) on the author + title of the book/paper, as opposed to going to a site that aggregates works and then searching, because a given site might not have that book/paper. I've often found books, for instance, that were not on places like Project Gutenberg.

8 Ways Journalists Can Access Academic Research for Free

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