In publishing, the term journal means a scientific journal or literary periodical devoted to a specific subject.
Due to licensing restrictions, remote access to many journals is limited to students and staff of various study institutes and universities.
So check the passwords, webbits, stalking,
luring and proxies sections
to learn some useful techniques to access such content.
This said, there is a very interesting,
and growing,
'pressure' that those almost useless blogs are applying on today's web:
since no one cares to pay, or even simply to wait, in order to enter a
newspaper's archive or a journal's database, blogs (and the web at large)
are -automatically- more and more linking ONLY to databases that are always accessible,
and I mean accessible without strings attached.
At the same time, since the importance of 'deep links for search engines' visibility
is growing more and more, only idiots that want to disappear into irrelevance will insist in
keeping their own archives (often the only interesting thing they have)
inaccessible or barred behind a locked entrance. Transparent archives mean publicity, blocked archives mean
irrelevance. See the newsfeeds section for more examples of this matter of fact.
Now, let's imagine that for our in-depth "private investigations" we need a given COMPLETE ARTICLE,
not an abstract, a complete text, and we do not want to pay anyone for that.
Let's imagine we want
something mathematic related, I haven chosen as examples ["polynomial"] and ["prime factorization"]
Most searchers would use the two most "common" search engines for MATHEMATIC-RELATED articles
of the visible web:
http://www.emis.de/ZMATH/, which you can use to start a search and
http://www.ams.org/mathscinet/search which you SHOULD NOT use, due to its commercial crappiness
Let's search for "polynomial"
Let's imagine we are interested in the
third result: "The minimum period of the Ehrhart quasi-polynomial of a rational polytope", alas! Now we would be
supposed "to pay" in order to consult/see/download it. But we'r seekers, right?
Let's use a part of the abstract in order to fetch our target in extenso: " called the Ehrhart quasi-polynomial of"...
see? Let's repeat this with any other article on this database...
Of course we could also have used google scholar
or Microsoft's Windows Live Academic (painfully slow). For the big
search engines' scholar searches, see below.
So, we have seen how to bypass commercial yokes using the previously explained "long string searching" approach.
The funny thing is that the web is so deep that we do not need at all to go through such bazaars.
In fact the "open source" waves are already purifying the closed world of the scientific journals as well. Good riddance!
Let's search on The Front (arxiv.org), that
is slowly beating the two "established" euroamerican commercial repositories black and blue...
for instance: "prime factorization",
but, to keep our previous example, also: "The minimum period of the Ehrhart"... et voilà.
On one side the Americans, who do not even let you search if you do not pay up-front (US-mathscinet) & on the other
one the Europeans, who let you search, but then
want you to pay in order to fetch your results (EU-ZMATH). Of course we could still
find our targets starting from there, but it
is refreshing to know that there is also -amazingly coexisting on the same web- a complete 'journals' search engine, with a
better (& rapidly growing) database and everything you need for free: the Front ("It freed anyone from the need
to be in Princeton, Heidelberg or Paris in order to do frontier research").
So -once again- the web is BOTH a bottomless cornucopia and an immense
commercial garbage damp, and -of course- you need to know how to search both sides of the same mirror.
ETDs (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) are a valuable resource IF TAKEN CUM GRANO SALIS: as anyone knowing his
evaluation lore knows, often theses are just the mirror of the lazyness and hubris of
mediocre professors. So: "caveat querens!" Here a short list of "starting angles",
a simple search will give you more.
A very good theses search engine is DART-Europe, here for instance "rhetoric":
http://www.dart-europe.eu/basic-results.php?kw=rhetoric
"DART-Europe is a partnership of research libraries and library consortia who are working together to
improve global access to European research theses. DART-Europe is endorsed by LIBER
(Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche) as part of the work of the LIBER Access Division,
and it is the European Working Group of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)."
Click on the "identifier" link in order to search for the fulltext of a thesis.
There's a database by the "Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations" which follows -alas- a restrictive (and obsolete)
model of proprietary information: this makes it often next to useless.
However, there are still many "unrestricted" theses here.
http://rogers.vtls.com:6080/visualizer/app/Search?search=new&q0=rhetoric
http://content.nejm.org/contents-by-date.0.shtml:
COMPLETE, full text archive (from 1993) of
the New England Journal of Medicine (Massachusetts Medical Society).
Abstracts only for the period 1975 - 1992
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/oxfordopen/:
COMPLETE, full text archive of all Oxford "Openaccess" journals.
(Evaluation warning: this approach is mostly used by "nobodies" that just fake academical deep-knowledge out
of thin air. But since even
academical established "someones" often enough just fake deep-knowledge themselves, you would be hard pressed to notice any difference in quality
whatsoever)
An example among the many quarterly above:
http://heapro.oxfordjournals.org/searchall/ "Health Promotion International responds to the move for a new public health throughout the
world and supports the development of action outlined in the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion.
The quarterly journal is is an Official Journal of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education,
and is published in association with the World Health Organization. It contains refereed original articles, reviews
and debate articles on major themes and innovations from various sectors including education, health services, employment,
government, the media, industry, environmental agencies and community networks. The journal provides a unique focal point
for articles of high quality that describe not only theories and concepts, research projects and policy formulation,
but also planned and spontaneous activities, organizational change, social and environmental development."
(Note that this part of searchlores overlaps with the older section journals in 'local resources'
Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/:
Directory of Open Access Journals.
This service covers free, full text, quality controlled
scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover
all subjects and languages. There are now 2209 journals
in the directory. Currently 604 journals are searchable
at article level. As of today 95820 articles are included in the DOAJ service.
http://arxiv.org/ (The Front) http://arxiv.org/: Open access to 365,819 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Quantitative Biology
http://www.itcompany.com/inforetriever/: Internet library for librarians,
"A Portal Designed for Librarians to Locate Internet Resources Related to Their Profession", very americanocentric.
CUI: Computer Science Library: (Centre Universitaire d'Informatique, Uni Genève),
"This database lists all the publications in the CUI's Computer Science library."
Can we really find on the web
FREE University level open courses for anyone?
Of courses :-)
And of course you must be quite careful and evaluate a lot.
You'll in fact have
to peruse
among the many (often bogus) "universities" offers, frequently polluted by pseudo scientific commercial crap, aimed
to scrap your money and delivering in exchange
ludicrous (and often slightly embarrassing) diplomas, but you'll also find some worthy knowledge nuggets (a couple of examples below).
Real free university courses (or internal university-level curses published fully on the web,
can deliver real knowledge to anyone
with a web connection, wherever he might be. Of course this is not always completely disinterested, the "celebrity"
fall out and back feed for the institutions and professors involved is thousand times bigger as the relatively modest costs
involved (the sums, while considerable, are peanuts for big universities)
As usual, on the web: caveat emptor (et gaudet fur :-)
The approach should be the following:
Choose a matter you are really interested in and you really like and enjoy
(never study "in order to get a job", that's just wasting your life)
Find out who are the best ad hoc professors on the planet and read what they wrote/did/do/write (beware the huge difference
between people that are good and people that are said to be good).
Find out which are the fundamental
books on the matter, fetch them on the web (they most probably are all there for free anyway, nowadays)
Read, study, read and improve. Always doubt what you learn, always evaluate thoroughly and
always study even more. Don't think that you can really learn anything without some YEARS of study.
Write, contribute, choose a subject you'r really utterly interested in and discover how easy it is to
improve the matter and to spread knowledge, especially of you'r not working alone and if you are in touch
with other like-minded specialists
Fetching a diplom in any university after such iter (and such work) will be quite easy... should a paper
diploma
really be needed: after all "non scholae sed vitae discimus", as ole Seneca (Note 1) was NOT saying :-)
Here some examples that seem solid and worth recommending
Since 8 years on the web, OCW now delivers more than 30 courses with complete video lectures
By liberating the course content
the Massachusset Institute
of Technology (where my friend Richard Stallman wrote emacs,
you can read the fascinating story here)
did indeed set the standard for education around the world: "MIT's commits to improve education
globally through the free and open sharing of knowledge. And the promise of OCW continues to grow:
we will enhance the Highlights for High School content, add more video courses, and expand our course content with
new and updated course materials"
Harward's Computer Science (suggested by Kane)
http://cs50.tv/: Computer Science 50: Introduction to Computer Science I
Harvard College Computer Science 50: Introduction to Computer Science I is a first course in computer science at Harvard College for concentrators and non-concentrators alike. More than just teach you how to program, this course teaches you how to think more methodically and how to solve problems more effectively. As such, its lessons are applicable well beyond the boundaries of computer science itself. That the course does teach you how to program, though, is perhaps its most empowering return.
With this skill comes the ability to solve real-world problems in ways and at speeds beyond the abilities of most humans.
The open university (suggested by Kane: "less mericanocentric")
http://openlearn.open.ac.uk: Open learn, english and less americanocentric The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials. This is the LearningSpace, where you'll find hundreds of free study units,
each with a discussion forum. Study independently at your own pace or join a group and use the free learning tools to work with others.
...powered by a number of software tools released under the GNU GPL
(c) 3rd Millennium: [fravia+], all rights reserved
Lately, many of our more industrious and investigative readers have taken it upon themselves to supply our
searchlores offices with documents which purport to complete and/or further illuminate many a
lore.
We send our thanks to the readers who provided hints and material; like-minded souls are encouraged to send further discoveries and suggestions
to the address of the responsible of this site, that you'll find listed elsewhere.
Notes
Note 1 In fact he said the exact contrary (stating a fact, and even criticizing it,
not approving it).
Seneca, Epistulae morales ad Lucilium, Libri XVII-XVIII
Epistula CVI, §12:
Apertior res est sapere, immo simplicior: paucis est ad mentem bonam uti litteris,
sed nos ut cetera in supervacuum diffundimus, ita philosophiam ipsam.
Quemadmodum omnium rerum, sic litterarum quoque intemperantia laboramus: non vitae sed scholae discimus. Vale.
The context is therefore important: here a nice french translation:
"La sagesse est plus accessible, elle est surtout plus simple: avec peu de science on y arrive.
Mais, habitués que nous sommes à prodiguer sans fruit tout le reste, nous faison de même par la philosophie.
Nous portons partout, et jusque dans la science, l'interpérance qui nous travaille: nous étudions, non pour
la vie réelle, mais pour l'école."
If you need the complete book just click here
Notes