Living on the edge of academia

This article fairly accurately sums up the process of doing research: you read about some idea, work like crazy for a few days/weeks/months to try a variant of it on your problem, discover it fails, and repeat the process. For the rare thing that actually does work, you rush to publish it, then quickly move back to the grind. There's no time to polish software for distribution, when the reward is entirely based on the number of documents you produce in a year.<p>This is why it amuses me when people stereotype academic scientists as impractical dreamers -- anyone who has stuck with the process of completing a PhD has demonstrated him or herself to possess a truly super-human tolerance for drudgery.<p>(Public service announcement: Hire a PhD! They need the work!)

If you graduated college, consult with your college librarian. The chance is, most journals have online subscription deals and they are accessible via VPN/proxy through your school's subscriptions. If this doesn't apply, go to a local University's library or research hospital in your area, most of these subscriptions are validated through universities' ip addresses - so any computer on campus will do. Trust me, I do this all this time even though I graduated already.

The ACM's copyright form states that author's are legally allowed to put a copy of the paper on their personal website. Really, you don't need to pay any subscription. If you know the author's names for a paper, chances are one of them will have it on their personal page.<p>Most of this is findable in Google within 30 seconds. Often when I search for a paper's title, I get a pdf from the author's site before an official ACM or IEEE listing.

Some university libraries have a public terminal or two (mine does), which has access to all the electronic journals they are subscribed to (ACM, IEEE, JSTOR, Springerlink etc).<p>They don't advertise this; you have to ask.

I end up needing a lot of research papers for the work that I'm doing. My solution is kind of lo-fi crowd sourcing. I'm usually in a few channels on Freenode and when I hit a paper that I'd like to have and can't hit with a few well-crafted Google searches I just ask if anyone around has access to them. Usually gets me the copy I need within 10 minutes or so.<p>Now, what's really annoying is market research. Friggin' Forester and their hundreds of dollars per paper. Hrmf.

The process the author describes is almost identical to the one I've experienced, despite the fact my area of research is different than his (machine learning), but his analysis of the results drastically differs from mine<p>Its true, 90% of the stuff doesn't work/isn't applicable and I have spent more money on buying papers than on rent in the past year, and I spend many days working on stuff that often has little or no positive effect. But its still the most cost effective research you can do, after you factor in the value of your time.<p>Every new idea I develop on my own takes far longer to develop and test, and trying to get better results than everyone else is a lot easier when you're basing your progress on the cutting edge instead of something that is a decade old.

There is a lot of value in failed results, especially in science. What doesn't work is critical, if for nothing else, than for protocol and experiment design. Freeing up negative data is a huge motivation behind Open Notebook Science(1) and a subject of much discussion on the science blogosphere(2)<p>1. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_notebook_science" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_notebook_science</a> 2. <a href="http://network.nature.com/groups/harvardpublishingforum/forum/topics/712" rel="nofollow">http://network.nature.com/groups/harvardpublishingforum/foru...</a>

The solution to the "Academic Firewall of Doom" is to get a degree, and then you can generally go back to your alma mater and get some kind of library account that will let you access the stuff behind the firewall (generally from within the library only, of course). Of course its been over a decade since that loophole worked for me, might have been closed up by now. Or it might have expanded.

For journal access, consider some part-time lecturing / mentoring at your nearest university. I mentor a group of business students once a week, and aside from the extra money and overall enjoyment, get a university email and athens account - as I'm undertaking market research for a new startup, this is saving me A LOT of money.

I pay a fee to have access to my local university library. (As a graduate of said university I get half price, but full price (160GBP) is still reasonable.) This gives me book-borrowing rights, and reference access to printed copies of journals, (but not electronic access).

It's a current tragedy in computer science research: authors release a matlab blob (no source code) or no implementation at all. When asked, I've encountered these answers:<p>1) An implementation <i>is not important</i>. We developed an <i>algorithm</i>!<p>2) Uh... the student who made the program already left and we can't find it.<p>3) [the student] I can no longer find my notes on which parameters I used to make the figures of the paper.<p>Very rarely, nearly never, does one encounter a proper software release.<p>Why? Many reasons--the key point is that only a handful of research institutions have technical staff on board to collect and curate software produced in house.

oh, that's so cute! it's almost like he's pretending that academia isn't a soul-less abyss controlled by self-aggrandizing profiteers.