Thought this was an excellent and concise video on the topic, figured I’d share with you all.
What are your favorite journals, publications, other sources?
I still have scientific journal access through my alma mater, but for those who don’t it can be really frustrating — especially since research is often funded to some extent with taxpayer money!
That said, in many fields it’s common to post research papers to e.g. arXiv before submitting to a journal. So if you see a research paper that’s behind a paywall, you can often find a nearly identical version on arXiv or similar. Note that this is not piracy, and the version you get on arXiv will be formatted differently, may not have the latest edits, etc., but the gist should be there. Also note that there’s nothing stopping crackpots from posting there.
If you really want to read a paper, it’s often easiest to e-mail one of the authors and ask for a copy. I published a fair few papers in my time, and shared many of them like this many times without any issues.
The only issue might be that after a few years, it’s possible that none of the authors can be reached via the addresses on the paper anymore, so you might have to go through their university (I’ve never tried this, so ymmv).
I have to note that aRxiv and bio-aRxiv are NOT PEER REVIEWED and are specifically mentioned in the video
It may be easier to go backward but you won’t know what parts might be wrong which defeats the purpose of doing research. One detail can affect the entire paper
Edit: as below commenter pointed out, they’re also not not peer reviewed, so you can definitely find some!
They are not not peer reviewed, its just that its a pre-print server, so they generally appear before getting peer reviewed. When they are, and published, it is usually really easy to see that also on arXiv.
Thank you for the correction!