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1. Go to the library of a public university

2. Download all the articles you want to a USB stick and print them at work.

3. Profit!!!

Downvoted? I thought that this was relevant to the whole publisher issue myself. They provide zero incremental value and serve as little more than incremental friction towards accessing their content freely. Notice that step 2 was not upload to scihub.

Peer review, the last thing that they did provide, seems to be undergoing disruption by crowdsourced attempts at replicating results.




> Download all the articles you want

Problem 1: 5 hours round trip

Problem 2: they only have about 2/3 of the papers I want.

Problem 3: I save what I need and get home and start reading. Then there's another layer in the citation tree. Oh well, go in tomorrow, another 5 hours, and get that one, maybe.

Or, to on scihub for the research we taxpayers paid for already.


1. You usually need to be a student or staff member to be able to do that.

2. Few universities have access to all journals - it's too expensive.


Not at state university campuses. I do this all the time at UC campuses. In fact I've been doing it for the better part of two decades since I left academia. And if I wanted to pay $60 or so annually, I could even borrow books.

Ironically, I've worked with academia and government labs on two major projects and because I don't have an official academic email address, I can't even get a researchgate account without paying.


Peer review is already mostly done by volunteer researchers and there are a bunch of nonprofit journals out there that organize peer review without passing it on to a for-profit journal.

The only value that the for profit journals still provide is the prestige of the journal, which has built up over the years.




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