Submitted by Comrade_Pingu in Science (edited )

So I don't know about many of you, but I myself am really into science, so much so I'm going to apply to a college for a PhD in theoretical particle physics. But one of the largest pains I can think of for staying up to date on the science going on right now, are the very journals publishing it. Yeah, I could go read something on Scientific American or whatnot, but I won't really be able to really read any of the hard hitting theory and experimentation without an expensive subscription to a journal like Physical Review Letters (prices can be up to over 900 American dollars a year for full paper copies). I don't have money to blow, so it's hard to try and read a good paper. Yeah, there's arXiv, but it may not always be reilable or easy to find the paper you're looking for.

TL;DR I just really don't like the current bourgeois science institutions.

EDIT: I'm not in college right now. I'm still in high school.

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23i wrote

libgen and scihub.

that is all.

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ziq wrote

There's no pirating of these journals? That needs to be rectified.

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squirrels wrote

There's scihub, but it has a distinctly biomedical bias in what materials they have gathered so far (which is cool - definitely an area to focus on first).

This issue is why Aaron Swartz cracked Jstor, and we all saw what happened to him. His death made quite a few scared ripples in academia.

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Blood wrote

Does the University your attending not have access to these journals?

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Comrade_Pingu OP wrote

I'm not in a university right now. I should have phrased that one part differently.

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squirrels wrote

This is why there is an Elsevier boycott: http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Please don't let this come across as discouraging, because we need as many intellectuals as we can get that are the raddle crowd, but this is just one part of why I believe academia may be irrevocably broken and needs replacing with a truly open source revolution. I've heard rants from senior faculty, and they furtively try their best to come up with ways to change things "from the inside" (we know how that goes), but the institutions are set up to squeeze as much money as possible from new researchers and systematically discourage them from open source publishing.

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