Find Affordable Academic Journals - Journal Access Solutions

[Lambduh]

Having recently lost access to my old universities online library and thus access to all of the journals that the college is subscribed to i am now seeking other means of accessing recent papers. Doing a bit of searching didn't turn up much unfortunately and as such i started thinking of what would be the perfect solution and was curious if something like it existed! I am not looking to cheat the system and get these papers free I would just like a more economical means than having to buy every paper that looks interesting at 20 a pop. arXiv is great but unfortunately i can't find a lot of things on there that i want to read.

Because I look at several different topics and read a lot of papers I was curious if there was a service similar to a Universities where you can purchase access to a bunch of different journals for a set fee per month or something of the sort. Basically an open version of Academic Search Premier or something. I can even imagine a fee based system where you get to view X amount of papers per month or something, /shrug.

Random other question: Are scientific papers similar to published books in that they aren't part of the public domain until the death of the author + 70 years? (or whatever it is exactly). I was surprised by the fact that even most papers from the early 1900 are still behind the closed doors of journals and not open to everyone:(

 

[story645]

Having recently lost access to my old universities online library and thus access to all of the journals that the college is subscribed to i am now seeking other means of accessing recent papers.

A lot of professional societies provide access to the journals they publish (ex: ACM, IEEE), so if you're looking for those types of papers you may want to join a society. I also found that a few societies offer subsidized jstor subscriptions if you're a member.