Is there an affordable way for non-students to subscribe to multi-journals/archives?

Question

As a student I had free access to thousands of scholarly articles through my universities in databases/archives such as JSTOR, EBSCOhost, Google Scholar, Econlit, PubMed, etc, etc.

With no subscription, glancing at the full text of any 1 article costs anywhere from $20 to $60.

For any one project or paper I'd use at least five to ten papers and I'd skim over the full text of many more. For a meta-analysis of the literature, I'd go over dozens and perhaps even over a hundred papers.

As a non-student the cost is extremely prohibitive to continue reading past the free abstracts. I don't want to pirate the papers or give up reading them, but I can't find any reasonable alternatives.

Does anyone know of any monthly subscription I could sign up for to give me student-like/institutional access to papers?

Note:
A community wiki answer has been added to this question to provide a list of solutions to the problem.

Answer 1

• Many papers are freely available on authors' websites, and preprint servers (use search engine to find those).

• Write to the authors, asking for copies. Majority of academics are happy when their work is read, and will send you a copy.

• Your public library might subscribe to more than you suspect. Check it out. When I was a student in a community college, my local public library subscribed to JSTOR for example.

• Become a student or an academic again :-)

Answer 2

To add to Boris Bukh's suggestions:

• Many institutions grant library privileges to alumni, which might include remote access to the university's online subscriptions. You might get in touch with the librarian at your alma mater and ask if they offer such a thing. (In some cases you might be required to join the alumni association and pay dues, but this would probably be on the order of US$10-$100 per year.)

• Many universities open their libraries to the public. If you live near any university or college that has appropriate subscriptions, you may be able to just walk into their library, sit down at a computer, and download the articles you want. Then just put them on a USB drive, upload them to a cloud storage account, or email them to yourself. For older articles that aren't online, the library may have them in bound volumes; they may not let you check them out, but you can photocopy or scan any article you want.

• Institutional access to subscriptions is usually based on IP address - all computers on the campus's network have access. So if you still have a computer account at your alma mater, you may be able to log into it and fetch articles through there. You may even be able to set up a proxy/tunnel/VPN or something similar to let you browse from your own computer but have requests routed through your university account. For instance, if you have a Unix shell account, this is easily done with an ssh tunnel (but the details are beyond the scope of this site).

• If you have a friend who's still a student or faculty at your alma mater or elsewhere, you could ask them to download the occasional article for you. (This is probably not helpful for your 100-paper meta-analysis, unless they're a really good friend.)

Unfortunately, as you've probably discovered, personal subscriptions are usually prohibitively expensive, and may have to be purchased individually for each journal, or at least each publisher.

Answer 3

A month after asking this question I randomly stumbled onto the type of solution which I was originally seeking -- open-market subscription based access to multiple journals and full-text article links from sources such as Google Scholar, PubMed, EconLit, etc.

While searching for full text access to an article on Manufactured Environmental Toxins in umbilical cords I noticed that one of the full text options was through a service called DeepDyve.

It claims to be the "Spotify of Academic articles" (Spotify is a popular Internet radio app that lets you download and play music at will if you subscribe). Here is a somewhat dated review from Ohio State's TechTip a la 2009. It's a $40/mo subscription plan for non-students like the institutional access you get within academia. I'm on a 2-week trial of it now.

Of course, I'm still going to continue to make use of many of the other good suggestions and I'm on the lookout for other services like this to select from.

USE WITH ADDITIONAL SOLUTIONS

In addition to the service I found, I'm taking advantage of several other solutions offered. Even with the subscription-based service there are many papers and journals to which I do not have access and the follow suggestions remain vital:

• Many papers are freely available on authors' websites, and pre-print servers (use search engine to find those).
• Write to the authors, asking for copies. Majority of academics are happy when their work is read, and will send you a copy.
• Your public library might subscribe to more than you suspect. Check it out.
• Many institutions grant library privileges to alumni, which might include remote access to the university's online subscriptions. You might get in touch with the librarian at your alma mater and ask if they offer such a thing. (In some cases you might be required to join the alumni association and pay dues, but this would probably be on the order of US$10-$100 per year.)
• Many universities open their libraries to the public. If you live near any university or college that has appropriate subscriptions, you may be able to just walk into their library, sit down at a computer, and download the articles you want. Then just put them on a USB drive, upload them to a cloud storage account, or email them to yourself. For older articles that aren't online, the library may have them in bound volumes; they may not let you check them out, but you can photocopy or scan any article you want.

LIMITATIONS OF THIS SOLUTION

The subscription-based service isn't a perfect solution. @J.Zimmerman points out that, unlike institutional access, you do not have the right to print or download papers. It's "read-only" access.

The selection of journals is quite large, but still limited. My feeling is that it directly provides access to about the same selection you'd have with most universities, but unlike universities there's no inter-library loan or other work-around for when you do not have access.

AFTERWORD

As I use this solution more over the course of the next few days I'll update this solution with further limitations and I'll better integrate it with the other useful solutions which have been posted. I will also take a suggestion from the comments to make this a Community Wiki solution.

Finally, I will also be on the look-out for any competing services like DeepDyve. Please update this solution if you know of any, so that we're not inadvertantly providing an advertisement for one arbitrary commercial service.

Answer 4

• Depending on where you are, you may have access through government-funded agencies (similar to public libraries).
  E.g. in Germany, the DFG purchases national licenses for quite a number of journals, and you can register for that as individual (technically, it works via the university library of Frankfurt)

• Your library may be able to get the paper via inter-library loan for less than the direct purchase costs.

• Not only universities, but also research instutes have libraries. These are often connected to library networks and may have access to quite a number of journals. In my experience, even if you cannot become member of that library, it is often possible to go there and read journals they have (including making a copy) as well as download papers they have electronic access to.

Answer 5

If you are in the UK, then you may be able to get access through your local public library.

Answer 6

I believe the answer is fairly simple here. The subscription that you may be looking for may not be a specialized article service, but rather the university itself.

Just find a university that has a good network, and register to do a course there. I believe some universities allow you to sign up for a single course, evening school or for a parttime scholarship, significantly reducing the costs.

Of course you will need to check the legal requirements, but as long as you use your access for academic research I think you should be ok.

Answer 7

It turns out that a related survey was posted this week in this PLOS blog post on how paleontologists access the (non-open access) literature:

I put together an informal, non-scientific survey. The survey asked questions about how people access the literature, the kinds of journals they can access most easily, and basic demographics. I advertised the survey via Twitter and Facebook. I wouldn’t count it as a scientific sample by any means, but I do feel that I got reasonably good coverage of various types of paleontologists at various types of institutions (as well as non-paleontologists who follow the literature). 115 individuals responded, during the course of about a week.

Answer 8

You could also check out Academia.edu which encourages users to upload papers that are then made available for free to that community.

Answer 9

Depending on your field, the answer can also be to join a professional organization and subscribe to their digital library. As an example from my field, members of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) can purchase an annual subscription to the digital library, with access to every paper ever published in any of their publications, for $99. I imagine other fields may have similar deals.