> Sure you can have access to journals but how do you even know what you should search for? I suppose this is sufficient if what you want to do research in is something that is currently mainstream?

I "research" stuff all the time, do a google search for some term and find an interesting paper then go through the references that seem interesting. Works better than you'd imagine, I was looking up CESK machines and down through the rabbit hole I eventually found the original paper with the non-obvious name of The Calculi of λ-v-CS Conversion: A Syntactic Theory of Control and State in Imperative Higher-Order Programming Languages. Honestly, those math-heavy CS papers tend to make my head hurt though.

Don't think there's a whole lot of people who would claim lambda calculus is mainstream but I can spend hours upon hours finding stuff to read about and most of (or all) the papers are easily downloaded off the author's website.