My experience is the same. I work in NLP, and I've found that at least everything administered by ACL (probably our largest professional organization) is pretty much always available.
I love that about ACL. Not only is open-access good and nice and all that, but it also means I don't have to screw around with VPNs and such when I need to get an article while I'm at home.
Re:What Makes Code Hard to Understand?
by denzil_correa on Thursday April 25, 2013 @12:58PM
(#5608339)
The only thing I do not like about ACL is the fact that is not indexed in DBLP. I have a paper in one of the ACL affiliated conference and it does not show up. I have since then shifted from core NLP and it doesn't really matter but it would be nice to be consistent with other indexing mechanisms.
almost everything I need I find in CiteSeer or ACM Digital Library (which does have a very small pay wall)
Re:What Makes Code Hard to Understand?
by macspoofing on Thursday April 25, 2013 @10:31AM
(#5607370)
ACM charges $200/year or $15/paper. A paywall is a paywall.
Re:What Makes Code Hard to Understand?
by denzil_correa on Thursday April 25, 2013 @10:30AM
(#5607367)
Out of curiosity - which area do you work in? Can you also post a couple of examples (from your area) of academic research papers not available for free download?
I've been out in the wilds of industry for a while now, so it's been a while since I needed to pay for something professionally... back in the halcyon days of academia, I worked in computational medicine and had (still have) interest in lingustics/neuroecon/neurosci and I still run into walls there occasionally. I can't cite specific examples for you, if I can't find it somebody I know can get me a copy.
Re:What Makes Code Hard to Understand?
by denzil_correa on Thursday April 25, 2013 @12:57PM
(#5608327)
> I worked in computational medicine and had (still have) interest in lingustics/neuroecon/neurosci and I still run into walls there occasionally.
Like I said earlier areas like computational Medicine, Biology and other such areas run into pay walls. CS research areas like theory, data mining, NLP etc. will rarely run into such problems.
This may be true for research in other domains but as a researcher in Computer Science I can assure you that the number of academic papers locked behind a paywall is negligible in CS. Only once was did I find a paper not available and I promptly received a copy by sending an e-mail to the authors of the paper.