The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: How to Retrieve Scientific Articles form the Internet

Abstract

The Internet is the largest source of scientific information. For a few years now, the role of library resources and scientific databases has been downgraded in comparison with the immediacy and simplicity of Google’s search toolbar when it comes to retrieving scientific articles. With the emergence of the Open Access movement, and especially since funding agencies began to establish it as a mandatory requirement, there has been some lack of understanding about the concept. However, there are three main characters that will help us clarify this: “The Good”, where we find the institutional or thematic repositories and their corresponding discovery tools, which enable us to disseminate our research and to find scientific articles; “the Bad”, where we find pages like Sci-Hub; and “the Ugly”, which are the copyright agreements that we sign with the journals without knowing all the implications that they involve.