Just A Quick Complaint!

Recently my uncle was telling me that services to find your former classmates are free in Poland, and that it's quite a popular undertaking. Apparently it's not uncommon to find sections of restaurants or other places reserved for sizable get-togethers. To my knowledge, stateside this doesn't really happen. Yes, we have our high school and college reunions, but there's not as much of a student driven approach here (I am not aware of the status of school-driven reunions in Poland).

The complaint I have is not in trying to find former classmates, but rather, I had hoped that the internet would function just a little bit more as a boon to academia and learning. A colleague recommended Google Scholar to me to find articles, and I inserted my topic. I immediately saw several papers that looked like they might be interesting, but I am only shown the abstract when I click on the link. From there, I am asked to pay for the article or a subscription. It seems that several other recommended databases function this way as well.

Most likely I can probably VPN into my university's network, and search for some of the articles through the school's list of subscriptions to journals and electronic archives, but that is a lot of work for what is essentially background reading, and for articles of questionable use at best (not to mention I don't know offhand if we have access to that journal, or if that article is available for what we /do/ have access to).

I support the free trade of such journal articles, though I must admit that I'm not fully aware of the actual consequences of such an action. At the very least, I do not support the cluttering up of the internet with articles I'm not paying for either way hiding the work of the wonderful linguists who do decide to share their work with me for free.