Online Computer Science articles repository?

Question

When I need some complex algorithm I first check if there's anything relevant already published on the Internet. 10 times out of 10 I'll find that someone already have figured out a solution much smarter than what I would have thought of.

Apart from a generic Google search, I use:

• Citeseer That has a lot of good theoric reports from Universities
• Dr Dobb's Portal More practical than Citeseer but very often too specific to a particular technology or language
• Arxiv Even more theoretic contains draft and pre-prints (just in case I'm desperate :) )

I've also found the J.UCS (Journal of Universal Computer Science) containing some interesting articles (but i've not really used any of the info I found there).

Do you know of any other place where good CS articles can be searched and read for free?

As a side note, does anyone find reasonable that ACM, IEEE and other scientific publishers ask from 10 to 40 dollars for a single article in pdf format? I mean, the authors are professors that are paid by the Universities and that usally offer the same article (or a pre-print or a somthing similar) for free on their site and 40$ is the price of good printed book with all the associated costs! I respect publishes' right to do their business but I think knowledge should be more accessible and the price seems really too high to me!

Answer 1

I check http://mathworld.wolfram.com for math-y stuff.

If you're a full member of the ACM, articles are [generally] free: which could easily make the cost of the membership worthwhile to you (or your employer).

Answer 2

Google Scholar.

Outside of that, I'm not sure. Most profs will have PDFs of their articles somewhere on their university home page, so you can look up people who've done research and get some articles there.

Answer 3

If you find something on ACM that is behind the pay wall, you can usually find it for free on one of the authors' websites or in the Citeseer cache. Also, a lot of CS articles are published by Springer and may only show up on their web site (behind a pay wall).

DBLP is useful if you want to look at a particular author or conference. Their links to papers are to the "official" for-pay versions, though.

BTW, individual membership dues for the ACM aren't too onerous and entitle you to access to their library. IIRC, they also offer group health insurance to members, which may be helpful if you're self-employed.

Answer 4

You can usually consult paper (and sometimes electronic) copies of journals and conference proceedings at university libraries (on site).

You can find field-specific resources as well. For instance, in computer vision, there's a lot of knowledge at http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/CVonline/

Answer 5

Google’s CS Curriculum Search might be useful. It's a Google web search restricted to the CS departments of universities. It categorises the results into “Lectures”, “Assignments” and “Reference”.

Also Scholarpedia, which is like Wikipedia but with standards.

Answer 6

There are fantastic mathematical libraries around for which you pay modest cost and get the whole library, in executable form, already ported to your platform. NAG - Numerical Algorithms Group, is by far the best well known, but there are others.

Answer 7

Microsoft Research might have some interesting articles as well. Microsoft Research