| abstract
| - The best source for accurate information on paleontology related topics is the primary literature, where original research is published. After you get a basic feel for the terminology, it becomes possible to learn by immersion by reading articles and trying to piece together what the authors are saying. A big problem, however, is access. Finding a copy of a journal can be difficult, and making copies can really add up. Subscriptions are usually obscenely expensive because most of these journals have pretty low circulation. So how do you get a hold of technical papers? Most scientific journals now offer PDFs of their articles online. Unfortunately, you are usually required to subscribe to the journal, pay a bunch of money, or go to a library that subscribes to the journal in order to access them. If you do live near a university or public library, it is not a bad idea to find out what journals they subscribe to and then spend a few hours in the library downloading PDF files and emailing them to yourself... it's a lot cheaper than making copies. However, if you don't have that kind of time or don't live near a major library, there are still a lot of places to find papers online for free, which some of you may already know about. But I'll list some of the ones I know about here:
* The American Museum of Natural History Digital Library provides free PDF copies of all four of their major publications. They are working to have every single issue from beginning to end. Many new dinosaurs have been reported in American Museum Novitates in particular.
* The Polish journal Acta Paleontologica Polonica also provides free PDF access to all issues dating back to 1997 on their website. Although the journal is Polish, all articles are in English.
* The French journal Geodiversitas commonly publishes paleontology articles. The website provides free PDF copies of all articles back to the beginning of 2000.
* A special edition of the Portuguese journal Gaia was released in 2000, although all the articles date from 1998. These articles are available for free online in PDF format.
* Science, perhaps the most prestigious American science journal, now allows free web access to all research articles more than 12 months old, to anyone who registers on their website (and is willing to receive a few emails). Articles are in PDF format and date back to 1997.
* The Royal Society of London is a scientific organization that publishes several journals. All articles in all journals are made freely available online in PDF format twelve months after publication. Of these journals, dinosaur articles are most commonly published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
* The British journal Palaeontology has PDFs available from 1957 to 2000 here (1999 and 2000 send you to Synergy, but it's still free).
* The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a journal published by the United States federal government, so all articles are freely available as PDFs on their website (better be since it's paid for by tax dollars!).
* Many of the journals in Oxford Journals' life sciences series are free.
* All of PloS One's articles are free.
* If you go to the online archives of many major journals, some provide a few PDFs as samples, usually of more recent issues. Digging through these sites is also a way to net the occasional free article. Where an article is available for free on e.g. the author's web site as well as via subscription at the journal's site, Google Scholar links to the free version in bold letters to the right of the journal link. In many cases you can get the "nuggets" from the abstracts of journal articles, which are generally free. Instead of abstracts, some subscription sites present the first pages of articles as free samples, and these usually contain the abstract and the first few paragraphs. Notable examples are journals published by Springer and the archive of pre-electronic articles at JSTOR. JSTOR's collection includes artciles from the Journal of Paleontology, and a Google search for an article in the Journal of Paleontology will link to the first page and abstract at JSTOR, as in this example.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)