Cheapest way for an individual to access a multitude of academic journals?

[Reply]

@mhendo

Also, if the OP is serious about being willing to pay, you can get full JSTOR access as an individual for $20 a month, or $200 a year.

Thank you! I didn’t know that either and will keep it in mind. I think $20/mo is reasonable if they have a good selection. (I’m not too familiar with the various databases, having accessed papers through Google Scholar the past few years directly).

Many academic authors would love to have their work available to a wider audience, but the realities of tenure and promotion mean that they submit their work to journals that end up hidden behind expensive paywalls. Plenty of them are happy to send you a copy of the article if you send them a polite email explaining your circumstances.

Also good advice. Thank you all who suggested this.

The prices charged for individual articles by some of the scholarly journals and databases are fucking ridiculous. Thirty or forty dollars for a piece of work that has, in many cases, been produced by academics paid with public money, or working for non-profit (and therefore tax-exempt) institutions. The public subsidizes academic labor, the academics produce the scholarship as part of their job, and the people who rake in the money from journal articles are private, for-profit gateways. There’s a real push in some academic circles for more open-access publishing, and i really hope that it moves forward.

Yeah, that’d be nice. Why doesn’t the NSF require open access as a condition of funding? Or do they do something similar?

[DingoelGringo]

Get a Library card and sit at the local library.

[Dewey_Finn]

Is your alma mater Humboldt State University? Because you can get a library card simply by joining the alumni association.

“Who is eligible to borrow items from the Library?
All current HSU students, staff and faculty have borrowing privileges, as well as current members of the HSU Alumni Association. Borrowing privileges are available for a fee to local community members - see link for details.”

[Reply]

@Dewey_Finn

Is your alma mater Humboldt State University? Because you can get a library card simply by joining the alumni association.

“Who is eligible to borrow items from the Library?
All current HSU students, staff and faculty have borrowing privileges, as well as current members of the HSU Alumni Association. Borrowing privileges are available for a fee to local community members - see link for details.”

I need to check if I can become an alumnus, having dropped out of college instead of graduating. I’ll call 'em on Monday. And borrowing doesn’t necessarily mean journal access, though another alumna said that they do get that… it’s just very expensive.

[P-man]

Your local library has access to EBSCO Masterfile. They have over 1700 periodicals, some which are academic journals, available. When I say “your local library”, I mean that I checked to see what Humboldt County has.

[Dewey_Finn]

@Reply

@Dewey_Finn

Is your alma mater Humboldt State University? Because you can get a library card simply by joining the alumni association.

“Who is eligible to borrow items from the Library?
All current HSU students, staff and faculty have borrowing privileges, as well as current members of the HSU Alumni Association. Borrowing privileges are available for a fee to local community members - see link for details.”

I need to check if I can become an alumnus, having dropped out of college instead of graduating. I’ll call 'em on Monday. And borrowing doesn’t necessarily mean journal access, though another alumna said that they do get that… it’s just very expensive.

The website also mentions access to local community members, at a fee. Or would it be cheaper to complete your degree?

[njtt]

@P-man

Your local library has access to EBSCO Masterfile. They have over 1700 periodicals, some which are academic journals, available. When I say “your local library”, I mean that I checked to see what Humboldt County has.

I very much doubt that that provides full-text access to many, if any, journals. It will probably just get you abstracts, but you can get them (from EBSCO even) over the open web anyway. I have tried using EBSCO via a public library,and it was worthless.

Reply, I don’t think you have told us what sort of subjects you are interested in. That can make a difference. JSTOR, for instance, will not be much use for getting up-to-date hard science stuff, although it is great for humanities and also has a good bit of older science (mostly old enough to be of historical interest). On the other hand, there is now quite a lot of free new stuff available via PubMed, now the NIH is trying to force more open access publication (this stuff should all show up on Google Scholar, though).

One thing I have discovered, that I don’t think Google always picks up, is that a lot of content of American Physiology Society journals (of which there are several, mostly pretty prestigious) is available for free if you go via their own web site. So far as I can make out, everything from 1998 to one year ago is free, and organizations (I am not sure if this available for individuals) can purchase access in perpetuity to all their stuff from up to 100 years before 1998 for a couple of thousand dollars.

Also, these days, a number of journals that normally charge large subscription fees are making a select few of their new articles open access. (I think authors have to pay for this, but some seem to be doing so, perhaps because of pressures from the NIH and similar funding bodies.) You can find these by vising the journal’s own web site. I know the Royal Society journals do this, but I think there are other ones, even from regular commercial publishers, doing it now too. Google Scholar probably will pick up a lot of this stuff, but I have found that it is not 100% reliable in distinguishing what is free, full text, and what is not.

[thelurkinghorror]

@mhendo

Actually, if you don’t have full paid access, you can register for a free JSTOR account and access three new articles every two weeks, or about 78 per year.

Interesting info, thanks.

This is excellent advice. Many academic authors would love to have their work available to a wider audience, but the realities of tenure and promotion mean that they submit their work to journals that end up hidden behind expensive paywalls. Plenty of them are happy to send you a copy of the article if you send them a polite email explaining your circumstances.

Yeah, draft your kiss ass letter. “Your research is *sooooo *amazing!” I can’t see why that would be a problem, but then some professors I’ve known may find reasons.

The prices charged for individual articles by some of the scholarly journals and databases are fucking ridiculous.

Awhile back, there was a minor flap because Reed Elsevier was involved in the weapons trade, and that’s bad or something. I figured I’d let them buy nukes if it mean articles were $0.99.

@P-man

Your local library has access to EBSCO Masterfile.

EBSCOhost is always my first search source (when I had access). It’s got most everything, YfieldMV.

Reply/OP: what kinds of things were you looking for?

[thelurkinghorror]

Yes, for some journals that are free to the authors, they can voluntarily pay to make it open access.

@njtt

Reply, I don’t think you have told us what sort of subjects you are interested in. That can make a difference. JSTOR, for instance, will not be much use for getting up-to-date hard science stuff, although it is great for humanities and also has a good bit of older science (mostly old enough to be of historical interest). On the other hand, there is now quite a lot of free new stuff available via PubMed, now the NIH is trying to force more open access publication (this stuff should all show up on Google Scholar, though).

Specifically, NIH funded papers go to PubMed Central. The catch is that it can take IIRC up to a year to show up after the original journal has posted it.
Good point, although Scholar will probably redirect to PMC.

[janeslogin]

Years ago all the libraries I was familiar with had a lobbying support and fund raising group usually called ‘‘Friends of the Library’’. A membership would get me access to all services I knew about. The part time students working at the libraries often did not know about it.

[Reply]

Thanks for the suggestions so far! I definitely need to look more into the alumnus status at my local university. We’ll see if that gets anywhere.

If not, hopefully between begging the author, using DeepDyve, and bugging my PhD friend I can still get everything I need – the latter being the most useful so far. Even when I was in university, I’d spend hours looking for a particular article to no success (Humboldt has access to a moderate amount of journals). Then I’d email my friend at Yale and he’d send me the full text in 3 minutes. Damned elitist universities and their information monopoly

[QUOTE=njtt;17887672
Reply, I don’t think you have told us what sort of subjects you are interested in. That can make a difference. JSTOR, for instance, will not be much use for getting up-to-date hard science stuff, although it is great for humanities and also has a good bit of older science (mostly old enough to be of historical interest). On the other hand, there is now quite a lot of free new stuff available via PubMed, now the NIH is trying to force more open access publication (this stuff should all show up on Google Scholar, though).[/quote]

@thelurkinghorror

Reply/OP: what kinds of things were you looking for?

This is the hard part. I’m not an academic, just a guy who enjoys learning about new things (shallowly) on the SDMB, Reddit, and Slashdot. My primary fields of interest are ecology (which already spans a bazillion life sciences), technology, and psychology – basically anything about how humans interact with their habitat, which is so incredibly broad a field of inquiry as to be useless. I just want to understand new findings a little better than most news articles are able to explain.

@janeslogin

Years ago all the libraries I was familiar with had a lobbying support and fund raising group usually called ‘‘Friends of the Library’’. A membership would get me access to all services I knew about. The part time students working at the libraries often did not know about it.

Good idea, but sadly our area is pretty sparse. The friends of my local library don’t even have a website. There doesn’t seem to be a county-level Friends group.

[njtt]

I just came across another “traditional” journal, Chemical Senses, that is making its archive (or, at least, some of it) freely available online, but where the papers do not seem to be showing up as downloadable on Google Scholar. It is an Oxford University Press journal, so maybe others of their journals (maybe all of them) are available in this way. (I haven’t checked, but I suspect that issues from the last 12 or 24 months are embargoed, but that older stuff, if it is new enough to ever have been in PDF format, is now free.) I do not know why Google Scholar isn’t picking it up. Maybe it has only very recently been made available, and Google has just not gotten around to it yet, or maybe there is some kind of barrier to Google’s spiders for some reason, but I had no difficulty in downloading an article “by hand” (and it was clearly marked as being available “Free”, so it is not an accidental lapse of the paywall, though I have, once or twice, serendipitously found those on publisher web sites too).

All in all, this says to me that even if something does not show up on Google Scholar, it still may be worth checking the journal’s own web site, as set up by its publisher, for possible free access. (Regular Google is pretty good for finding journal/publisher web sites.)

[psychonaut]

Are you an active editor on Wikipedia? If so, you may qualify for free accounts from a number of academic book and journal publishers. Wikipedia currently has partnerships with the British Journal of Medicine, De Gruyter, JSTOR, Oxford University Press, the Royal Society, and many more. Of course, the expectation is that you will use access to these resources, at least in part, to help improve the encyclopedia.

[Inner_Stickler]

@DingoelGringo

Get a Library card and sit at the local library.

Seriously, this. Get a library card from your local library and go online to their website. I can access everything from EBSCO to Academic Search Premier to JSTOR to the OED to PubMed all for the low low price of nothing.