Apparently CNN is instituting a paywall

[conuly]

Now, you know my opinion on paywalls is that they're generally crap and easily bypassed, and with that note here's another way to bypass paywalls: With a library card! I mostly use my NYPL card to access the OED, and not gonna lie, that's a good 85% of the reason I bothered to get a NYPL card in the first place after the kids stopped letting me use theirs for this purpose. But! You can also use the NYPL library card for other purposes, and the same is true for most other decent-sized library systems. Even if your town only has a dinky library system with, apparently, no budget for this sort of thing you may be able to get a library card at your nearest bigger city system, perhaps for a fee. Well, there's no harm in asking, anyway.

Comments

[adafrog]

Neat, thanks.

[landofnowhere]

I use my local public library card to access the NYT and the WSJ. It generally seems like a win-win -- I get access, the publications get paid for their content, and the library gets to say that its services are being used!

I also have an academic library card that gets me into most paywalled academic stuff -- that's not as easy an option for people not working in academia, but people who went to a fancy college should look into what online library privileges their college gives to alumni!

[thewayne]

Dinky town libraries are frequently part of county coalitions. And state libraries are usually free to residents, though may require registration. Many university libraries offer membership to non-university peeps for small fees, but may reduce services, like not offering interlibrary loan.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Same, ever since I stopped being able to read physical books, the OED and JSTOR are the main reasons I still keep my Boston Public Library card current. There's no trouble getting a card without living in Boston: "If you live, own property, or work in Massachusetts, you can get a BPL card. Students who live here while attending school are also eligible."

If you know of a (legal) way past the Springer and Elsevier paywalls, that would be of great interest to me...

ETA: Perlego (which is not cheap, but loads cheaper than buying the books individually) is good as far as it goes, despite the interface being borderline unusable, but it doesn't have journals.

[mildred_of_midgard]

people who went to a fancy college should look into what online library privileges their college gives to alumni!

Absolutely none! "Library cards allow patrons to access print collections. They do not provide access to UCLA Library's online materials." That's true even if you got your PhD at UCLA and you're an independent scholar publishing in research journals. :( This has been a thorn in my side for 15 years now. "Independent" means independent, I guess.

What fancy college did you go to?

[landofnowhere]

:( I work for a paywalled academic database, and it frustrates me how uninterested my employer is finding ways for independent researchers to get access to our database (even if they're willing to pay)!

Harvard provides alumni access to a limited number of online resources. I assume cahn would know better than I do whether it's useful, since my job comes with its own university affiliation.

(That said, my sister somehow has access to some databases through her community college alumni ID, so it's not always about fanciness!)

[conuly]

Dinky town libraries are frequently part of county coalitions.

Sorta like how NYC's three libraries are really one library even though they're also not?

[thewayne]

Sorta.  The Alamogordo city library is open to all county residents, I'm not sure how to borrow from the New Mexico State library - I should find out.

[silveradept]

We do not have current edition access to many publications online (but we do gave a fair few), but we definitely have access to the text of many of their digitized archives. Which is good for when you want historical research and kind of crap when you want the headlines. But it is still definitely free, and between us and our neighbors with cooperative use agreements, you can get a big swath of it all for free.

[madamoiselle_sambuca]

Oh rly??? *checks to see if her library card has expired which it has* A lot of homeless people congregate at our library. :o

[conuly]

Well, the unhoused population has to go somewhere.

[conuly]

:)

[frandroid]

There's a new generation of paywalls (well, the WSJ and FT had been doing this for over a decade, but they were alone there for a long time) where the article body of the text is only fed to the DOM when you have provided valid credentials, so I think the days of easily circumvented paywalls will soon come to an end. It's interesting to see which newspapers adopt this, but there has definitely been a big spread of this in the last year.

[madamoiselle_sambuca]

Aye very true. :o