How can I pay for access to all academic journals?

Jorriss

What exactly are you planning on writing a book on anyhow?

Mute

Ok, I'll bite: what qualifies you to be regarded as one of the world's top experts on Finnegans Wake, and why is a person with such a qualification unable to get into grad school?

g.lemaitre

I made a big mistake in boasting. Now I have to justify that boast. I should have kept my mouth shut. Live and learn.

The lead expert has a website with 80,000 footnotes on the book. He's done the hard work of making all the footnotes accessible to a person in an easy format. But he has no ambitions to explain what the book means. The website is called fweet. According to him I'm the leading contributor to the site. I'm not saying I am the leading expert on the book, after all I haven't proven myself, but one of maybe 10 or 20.

As for why I can't get into grad school I haven't yet published on the Wake. I have bigger ambitions right now. That still doesn't answer why I can't get into grad school. I got bad grades as an undergrad back in 2000, 2.3 gpa. With 200 candidates and only 10 seats it's very hard to beat the other 10 candidates with such a bad undergraduate gpa. Going back to undergrad and lifting my gpa is not economical. Even if I were to do it, it would cost roughly 20,000 dollars and take 2 years, not to mention waste about 1000 hours of time. All that time and money could be spent better elsewhere. Besides although being an independent intellectual is certainly not fun, one can adapt to that lifestyle. There's always hope.

micromass

I don't really understand why you are asking all of this on a physics forum. Wouldn't this discussion be more suitable on a humanities or english website?

And really, posting footnotes on a website does not mean that you are a leading expert.
The most prolific poster on PF is Doc Al (with an astonishing 38000 posts!!). And while I don't want to underestimate the awesomeness and intelligence of Doc Al, posting on a forum does not make you a leading expert in physics.

Who knows, maybe all the leading experts on Finnegan's Wake don't want to post on site? Just because you have the time and dedication for it, doesn't necessarily make you a leading expert.

0xDEADBEEF

I have no idea if you will become a professor or not. I doubt it, because it is not about the person who is the most qualified, but the most popular one who has played all his cards right, just like in politics.

In Europe most university libraries will offer access to journals either to the public or to people with "guest" or "pensioner" status. If you have some kind of master title you might even be able to get a PhD because professors don't care all that much, if you do the work and they don't have to pay you. If you are truly the expert on your topic, and you want the world to know about it, by all means publish your book. Great theories have been born from people who were not taken seriously at the time of publishing. But don't expect the book to sell, or to get recognition or anything like that unless you have people who promote your work.

From my point of view most of the humanities research is bollocks, and as there are no criteria to objectively judge the quality of humanities work, promotion into a professorship due to ingenious discoveries is pretty much impossible, unlike for example in mathematics.