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Dunno if this will ever get read but next time you run into a problem like this here is an easier way to get the artice.

First try http://www.citeseer.com/, they often have the paper and even if they don't they list the papers that refrence the one you want. Often later work will have a summary of the paper you want and then some improvements.

If that fails head to the local university library. They have subscriptions to these journals and it is no problem to go photocopy the artice you want.

Hope that helps,
Mark

Unfortunately it's not that simple. Many would argue that the 'user pay' systems doesn't work. First, much of the research published is paid for by government grants via taxes, so taxpayers are paying for the "privilege" of reading about research they already paid for themselves. Second, the goal of disseminating research results is the progress of society, so that people can learn from each other's work. With the user pays approach, only the rich or "connected" (e.g., paid for by employer) can afford it. Libraries are an option for some, but not everybody lives near a university, not every university offers public access, and libraries obviously don't have all journals. My former university library stopped getting many journals (too expensive) and instead joined a program where you could order in articles from other libraries for free, as long as you were a grad student at the university.

I'm not sure there is an ideal model for every case. I know I wouldn't have even a fraction of the papers I've read now if I had to pay for them myself. Citeseer has been a big help, and they seem to get by ok. Of course they don't publish their own (just a search for papers with links) and they get funded through sponsors, grants, donations, and have volunteers.

I've been using CiteSeer for years in my research, and still prefer it over Google Scholar.

For computing research CiteSeer and the ACM DL are the two places to go. Scholar may obviate the need for going to both places, someday, but for now it needs to mature a bit.

I find it really disturbing that there is this general mistrust against students there. In most cases a professor/teacher would know the style of the students and if that suddenly changes to a proficient writing style that leaves nothing to be desired that should ring a bell. Yes you could argue that this is a problem when there are new students but I think it should be easy for a teacher to find out the capabilities of a student. And after all if a teacher finds a sentence or paragraph he finds suspicious he could use citeseer or google to crosscheck.

Clustering algorithms are well known in the information retrieval field (try searching for "clustering" on CiteSeer for example).

Google has more than enough expertise to roll out clustering if they want it.

I think this is a good idea overall. It helps to level the playing field for poorer universities. Also, since there's fairly blatant Napster-like copyright violations done by every researcher and by article repositories (Citeseer), this would pave the way for truly open research content.

Take a look at this email to get an idea of the various battling forces in the academic world.

Check out newsseer It was written by the same people who wrote citeseer, the great research index.

This research is from the same people who created CiteSeer

For research on programming languages and cryptography (two of my favourite areas of research), citeseer.com has all you need. It is a really beautiful system that allows you to traverse the graph of which papers reference which others, for example.

It does other kinds of papers in addition to those two areas that I mentioned, but I can't vouch for the usefulness of those areas.

Zooko

There has been lots of work on information visualization. It's not really like The Matrix, but attempts to be. Check out PNL's visualization team's work. In Citeseer, look for articles about Bead and Lyberworld.

I've done some work on this with a system called Yavi; can send a reference if you want. It's not hard to find lots of work on this. For an historical bibliography (1993 + prior), see my references here.