Do not pay for academic papers, because if you are a student, your institution probably has subscriptions to the publisher. (And your institution has paid BIG BUCKS for the subscription.)
Three different ways to get access to papers:
- Bookmarklet to your institution’s subscription (see how to do this below for U of T)
- Set up Google Scholar to default to your institution’s subscription
- Email the lead author of the paper to ask for a pre-print
Bookmarklet to access papers (UofT specific)
Add the following as a bookmarklet (for Chrome):
javascript:void(location.href='http://myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/login?url='+location.href)
When you navigate to a page that needs a subscription (e.g. ACM DL, IEEE, Springer, etc.), just click the bookmarklet, login with your UCalgary credentials, and you’ll be able to download any PDF that our university has a subscription for.
Thanks to Wes Willett for the original one for UCalgary, and then this page for the code for UofToronto: http://individual.utoronto.ca/hiltsand/myaccess.html