Hi

I am not a student any more, so I've lost my "Athens" pass for scientific online journals.
I don't work in a university (my job's completely unrelated to science).
I wanted to ask you girls/guys what would be a good deal for having access to online journals (maybe in a similar way as the Athens access I used to have).
I am not rich at the moment, so I have to look for a cheap deal.
Any suggestions?
Thanks

BTW my favourite source if it makes a difference used to be Sciencedirect.

Hello Seriousperson

It seems to me that you will have to go with open-access material. Actually there is a big push, certainly among some sections of the academic community, for open access to become more and more normal. If you're not already familiar with, try:

The Directory of Open Access Repositories, available at http://www.opendoar.org/

The Directory of Open Access Journals, available at http://www.doaj.org/. I had a quick look and it seems to have 233 journals in biology and the life sciences at the moment, broken down into
Anatomy (10 journals)
Botany (75 journals)
Cytology (11 journals)
Genetics (50 journals)
Microbiology (49 journals)
Physiology (33 journals)
Zoology (89 journals).

Other than that I would advise just going into the different journal titles and if you spot an article that you particularly like, post a request for it here and generally you will get it within 24 hours. That, I know, is not feasible if you just want to browse. I'm not sure if you have your PhD or not but you could try approaching your alma matter and see if have any sort of scheme for past graduates. Try your alumni office and/or the library. Tbh, I'm not aware of any libraries that do that but nothing ventured, nothing gained...

SAGE have an open access journal. I've just looked at it and it has a smattering of articles across the disciplines but nothing really in the life sciences. It focusses on the social, behavourial sciences and the humanities. It's at http://sgo.sagepub.com/?utm_source=sageopen&utm_medium=sageopen&utm_content=text&utm_campaign=1115024JA_F&priorityCode=1115024JA_F. Still if SAGE are doing it, maybe other publishers might be thinking of doing the same. ScienceDirect does have some free view articles via guest access - http://www.info.sciverse.com/sciencedirect/using/access_article_display/guest.

Good luck with it

(up)

Thanks, Ady.