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How do you feel about ieee and other paid research websites?

Every time i search something complex, an ieee research paper would pop up and i couldn't read it, coz i don't have the membership. Even if i did, i had to pay Rs. 1000 (~=$12) . For every paper i want to see

I am not saying its bad to demand a price for your work. But i wish ieee was more like github or medium, where people could also optionally publish their content for free viewing. The cost is making a lot of students miss deep knowledge of research papers.

The main thing that currently frustrates me as a student is the fact that University subject syllabus are made by sulky old phd teachers who have been long term members of ieee and other paid research orgs, and thus have designed the syllabus with topics which are covered nowhere but in research papers.

I also know that some of you sre thinking "dude , just google search anything and you will find tons of videos and content on anything", but from what i have observed, free internet takes time to grow for a perticular topic . If i search a relatively complex topic i may find some surface info and basic videos, but to go deep, i have to rely on paid/pirated books and papers.

These organisation has gathered a lot of content and renowned people. Maybe they can give away a few knowledge to the open source.

Comments
  • 4
    I agree that those closed access sites can be problematic, but they usually publish quality content (= peer reviewed) only.
    On contrast, neither Medium nor Github ensure that, or have any intention to do so - otherwise research papers would be only published on those sites.

    While there are Open Access journals - where the scientist has to pay all costs, but the papers are free to access -, many of those journals have later proven to have to low standards for being respected as serious science journals (obviously this isn't valid for all).

    Many universities have contracts with publishers like IEEE, Springer and Elsevier - granting every student (professors, and so on...) access to all papers and publications without any extra cost.
    At the same time, there are protests against unethical practice of some journals, e.g. charging to much for papers and not paying the peer reviewers (without them nothing would) anything.

    Just to note: Many papers are published on preprint servers (like Arxiv) before beeing published in journals - so if you find an interesting paper, you may want to look if a preprint one exists. Be warned that the preprint versions are commonly the not yet peer reviewed versions and thus may contain mistakes not found in the official published one.
  • 0
    Yeah, definitely a pain in the ass to find a paper related to your research but it was in a paid archive.
    Since I don't want to work in academics, registering the membership will be a waste of money for me.

    I once have to contact the researchers on ResearchGate to share me the paper. Thankfully they did so I didn't have to pay for the paid content.
  • 3
    Contact the paper authors. Most send you a copy.
  • 3
    Try googling 'Sci-Hub' ;-)
  • 1
    @sbiewald you present good points, thanks. Yeah i didn't considered peer reviews which are probably the reason those papers are so detailed and full of quality original content.

    And unfortunately my college is a shit money sucker who can't "afford" ieee membership for us, so i guess i will try to contact the authors over the email to give some points for my doubt
  • 0
    Paywalls are infuriating, but they definitely help improve quality. I'm not against them for science papers.

    Questionable about news since the overwhelming majority of people would rather get their news for free -- which means they are the product. This also means paid news sites probably wouldn't survive. Sadness.

    Looks like it's back to the world of misinformation.
  • 2
    sci-hub.tw
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