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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

I know this topic has been done to death but it still blows my mind that most of those papers are not freely available. It would be nice if the freely available ones were marked as such in the list.

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It still blows my mind that people claim this is true. Almost all CS papers are on the author's website, eprint, arxiv, etc. Google scholar even links to them.

Don't get be wrong, closed publications are a travesty. But they are a travesty because institutions pay out of government grant money (indirectly via overhead) to pay for subscriptions and because it's government funded research. They are not, at least in anything approaching the average case, a travesty because researchers cannot access results.

Really? I just clicked 10 random link and all Google Scholar searches redirected to a http://dl.acm.org/ paywall. Maybe I'm missing something?

edit: Ah, I just noticed some searches have a direct link to the PDF next to the main search result "[PDF] from domain".

The primary link is almost always to the canonical version which is usually the pay walled one(even if it's not the most in depth version the author wrote). Did you check for the links on the right hand side? Those are the pdf's that google found. Of a pseudo random set I clicked on, all had links.

If you search little bit more, you would be be able to find that work somewhere else for free download. Some application paper published by Springer etc are difficult to get.

If you are a member of a public library in a metropolitan area, take a look at the available journals and journal databases there. You might be pleasantly surprised.

It's not "freely" available but it's not something that everyone has to pay publishers directly for.

Hmm. Most that I clicked on were freely available. The links go to Google Scholar searches, and most of those indicate that a PDF is available.

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