Most of my students in adult education do not have an 'institutional login' which would enable them to access online books and journals that are behind paywalls.
That is true also of independent scholars.
Indeed, it is true of everyone who wants to learn but isn't a member of a University!
So, how can people access scholarly work without spending large amounts of money to buy books or access to journal articles.
You might be able to access online material in your local library. The Access to Research project aims to make this a possibility in the UK.
Your local library could arrange for you to borrow a physical copy of a book you were particularly interested in via an 'inter-library loan.' These services may be limited, though.
If you live near a University they may offer you the chance to enter their library and browse their collections. You may have to apply for permission, of course, but their website should indicate what they offer.
JSTOR
JSTOR is a website that provides articles from very many academic journals (not always the most recent ones though).
JSTOR are currently
(during the pandemic) offering I think 100 free journal articles per month, up
from the usual six, so if you can find a journal article via JSTOR you may be
able to download it (though not all will be available). You can set up an account
here: How
to register & get free access to content – JSTOR Support
Some academics make the penultimate version of their paper available, even if the full version is behind a paywall.
They usually do this via their personal or University website, or on their accounts on academic websites such as academia.edu, researchgate, ssrn...
Google scholar often provides links to these free versions of
papers when they are available. Clicking on the link will sometimes lead you there, or the pdf link on the right-hand side...or click on the 'all ## versions' to see links to the several versions, some of which may have freely available links (though be a bit careful - these may not be legitimate).
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| Image by Gerd Altmann |
Old books
Classic books that are out of copyright are often freely available online.
Project Gutenberg has been working to transcribe classic texts that are out of copyright and make them available to all.
However, there are many other websites that offer older books, such as google books and many subject specialist websites.
You can also often view the first pages of a book online. This can give you an idea of whether it is really useful to you or not before you go on to buy it (or request it from your local library).
Publishers sometimes provide the introductions to their books to tempt people to buy them.
Google books (and Amazon ‘look-inside’) sometimes show the early parts of a book.
There are often options, if you want to read the first part at least.
Other online resources
There are loads of interesting materials provided online.
Academic lectures are sometimes available to view to You Tube, or University Websites.
Specialist podcasts exist in many academic fields, and some of these will be accessible to newcomers.
Many academic institutions, museums and so on have made their archives available to view online.
For a collection of free resources (or at least free during the current Pandemic) you could look at this "Curious Minds" collection of recommended online materials.
Free online courses
You need to pay a small fee for the courses I teach. This is to cover the cost of putting the course together, the administrative support, and obviously to pay me for my time.
However, there are sometimes free courses available via various providers.
The Open University lists its free courses via Open Learn.
You can find these listed on sites like Coursera and EdEx (alongside paid courses). Some of these are MOOCS - Massive Open Online Courses, which provide online content for people to work through in their own time.
The idea with these is often that you can view the content (or the first part of a course) for free in the hope that you then pay to get the qualification in it.
A lot of these free online courses won't have the same active input from a tutor as a paid course would, but they could provide you with a useful introduction to a topic.
Have I missed any? Let me know!
As time goes on I hope that more and more academic work will be available without paywalls. "Open access" is becoming more common.
Academics want their work to be read and influence society after all!
Of course, publishers want to make money from this work, which is the reason for the limits; if things are free they don't make any money back on their investments.
Nevertheless, in the shorter term, there are many resources available without becoming a University Student.
I've listed some above, but do feel free to add further links in the comments below.
Learning takes time and effort, but it need not necessarily require a lot of money.
4 comments:
A student asked a really good follow-up question on this: "How do you know whether a source is reliable?"
In answer, it can be really hard to know what is a good source. My glib answer is that over time you do get a feel for it.
Books
The best sources are books from University Presses (such as Oxfird UP, Cambridge UP etc.). However, many scholars write for well-known commercial publishers, such as Springer and Routledge, which will also apply some academic rigour to their processes.
However, there may be some publishers who won't apply any checks on their books, and put out any old rubbish.
Journals
Peer reviewed journals are very reliable. It is very competitive to get published in a top ranking journal -they reject 90% or more of the submissions.
However, there are loads of journals out there, some with very plausible sounding names (similar to the top ranking ones), which are not really reputable at all. Recently there has developed this industry of Predatory Journals which make money by charging scholars to publish their work. They act as if they are thorough but in reality they are not.
Some authors put papers up online for free, perhaps because they weren't able to find anywhere to publish them. While these could be good quality, there isn't any way to tell without reading it.
How to judge?
As you say, you just get a better and better feel for this with experience.
Prestige of the author, prestige of the author's institution (though this is no guarantee) and prestige of the publisher/journal are some proxies you can use.
Citations is another metric that gets used; do others find it useful?. Google scholar shows the citations it has picked up for different articles and seems to take account of these in its search results.
Thanks for this Doug, I have posted this into the Oxford moodle so others can also benefit.
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