How to Research Almost Anything Part 3: How to Access Almost any Scientific Paper with Unpaywall, Open Access Button, and Sci-hub
This is the third part of my tutorial series How to Research Almost Anything. This series will teach you:
- How to download tutorials and course material from youtube, edx, and coursera.
- How to find almost any book with libgen and the gutenberg project.
- How to access almost any scientific article with sci-hub, unpaywall, and the openaccess button.
In this article I'm going to list out some good open access journals, talk a little about preprints, and then show you how to access paywalled articles.
Open access journals make all of their submitted articles freely avaialable to the public.
PLOS journals typically focus on the biological sciences but they will accept papers on any topic that passes review in PLOS One.
Elife is another reputable open access life science journal.
OLH is exactly what it says it is.
Most cutting edge computer science work is published in conference preceedings which tend to be more open and made freely available. For example NIPS makes all of their papers freely available online.
Preprints are drafts of papers that get submitted to preprint servers for peers to review. They are almost always open access and on the cutting edge of research. They allow authors to establish precendence early, submit their papers to public review, and show off to potential publishers. Check out this list of preprint servers by topic! I'm personally a fan of bioarxiv.
Have you ever tried to read an academic paper and you get paywalled?
You could tried getting around it with the open access or unpaywall but if you're ever stumped or out of luck find your articles DOI and paste it into sci-hub's search bar like so:
Find the DOI on the page of the article you're trying to access.
Copy it into sci-hub.
Retrieve your article and download it.
You now have access to 64.5 million research articles! If sci-hub ever goes down or isn't working check wikipedia to see what sci-hub links are currently working.
Now that you've been through my series on how to access millions of books, articles, and courses for free you should find a way to manage and cite your sources! I use zotero a lot because of it's firefox citation plugin and the ability to drag premade citations into papers. You can get started with zotero here!
This has been a part of my How to Research Almost Anything tutorial series. Check out the links below and be sure to follow me @timothystiles on twitter to get updates about my latest posts!
- How to download tutorials and course material from youtube, edx, and coursera.
- How to find almost any book with libgen and the gutenberg project.
- How to access almost any scientific article with sci-hub, unpaywall, and the openaccess button.
P.S If you've got anything to add please feel free to submit an issue or a pull request!
how-to-research-almost-anything © by Timothy Stiles
how-to-research-almost-anything is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You should have received a copy of the license along with this work. If not, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.