Since a bunch of us are going about this independently (no company backing us, no university affiliation) I'm wondering if you all have good suggestions for getting access to the materials that normal university researchers have access to. In particular I'm interested in research journals and libraries. We can of course join organizations like ACM and IEEE, and given that we aren't taking a salary for this work we can easily argue that we should get the student rate. But IEEE in particular is still pretty expensive. Your local university library is also a great resource and so far I've found that residents can walk through the stacks and in fact also borrow. But it's not the same as having a student id and accessing everything the university has to offer. Do any of you have any advice for indie researchers like myself?

Haha yeah I feel you. I'm semi-ashamed to mention sci-hub in this context... Can you give specific examples of books or papers you want access to but cannot find currently?

I use pirated scientific articles without any shame

I've heard that if you contact the authors they sent you a copy (if not already in their profile page in the publications section)

Lots of times you can find an article on the authors website if you search

title.pdf

. Depending on your location, you might be able to go to a library with access to some db. And finally, I’m lucky enough to still have friends in grad school and i send them periodic emails with long lists of pdfs I want 🙂

I almost always end up finding the papers somehow. The internet is awesome! But it can sometimes be a pain and I wish I could just browse and view them one after another. A lot of the papers I like I find out about in the references to other papers on the ACM website. It's the one membership that I actually pay for and then the link is to the damned IEEE website. Ugh. A lot of the papers I want are old, scanned from the original journal, so they are unlikely to be anywhere else on the web.

Coincidentally Apress and Springer are having a sale right now where all their e-books are $7 only.

link?

ResearchGate is good for requesting articles from authors; they make it simple to both request and reply to requests. Without an institutional affiliation you’ll have to send RG an email to get an account.

@Mariano Guerra Do you see this link at the top about cyber week (not sure if it's US only 😞)

navigating a little the banner appeared! thanks! 🙂

did you click the link in the banner? then go to the cart and see.

Haha nice 😄

🎉

semanticscholar is your friend