Over the last year, VincentYu, gwern, myself and others have provided 132 academic papers for the LessWrong community (out of 152 requests, a 87% success rate) through the Free research, editing and articles thread. We originally intended to provide editing, research and general troubleshooting help, but article downloads are by far the most requested service.
If you're doing a LessWrong relevant project we want to help you. If you need help accessing a journal article or academic book chapter, we can get it for you. If you need some research or writing help, we can help there too.
Turnaround times for articles published in the last 20 years or so is usually less than a day. Older articles often take a couple days.
Please make new article requests in the comment section of this thread.
If you would like to help out with finding papers, please monitor this thread for requests. If you want to monitor via RSS like I do, Google Reader will give you the comment feed if you give it the URL for this thread (or use this link directly).
If you have some special skills you want to volunteer, mention them in the comment section.
(If anyone knows a general way to get theses when the obvious download fails, I'd appreciate knowing. They seem pretty hard to get.)
Yeah, I've had difficulty accessing theses as well. My roommate tells me that the reason is that nobody wants to access them because they're almost always just a set of previously published papers (in many fields you publish 3 papers and staple them together for a thesis). This suggests the alternative of finding the papers that make up the thesis. You'll miss out on the introduction by the author, but they may be a lot easier to get a hold of.