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If you're interested in academic papers, look at the top 2-3 conferences in each field (e.g. VLDB/SIGMOD for databases, SOSP/OSDI/USENIX ATC/EuroSys/NSDI/PODC(more theoretical) for systems/distributed systems. Some of the above might require an ACM digital library subscription to see the papers (which is really good value in my opinion), but others are completely free (i.e. the USENIX conferences). In many/most cases you can often find a copy of the paper online on the author's website.

all VLDB papers are also completely open access. You can find e.g. last year's papers here: http://vldb.org/pvldb/volumes/15.

> Where do folks go to be on the forefront data world (databases,algorithms, distributed systems, etc)?

Search for IRC channels on the topics of interest.

I'm currently going through one of the papers on https://www.nowpublishers.com/DBS and finding it good.

Some of these journals are behind a paywall. :(

If they're from publicly funded universities I'd wish the scholarly work would be free. I understand things coming out of Microsoft Research, for example, being pay-walled.