Update: Please use the most recent thread.
The LW Public Goods Team wants to encourage useful research projects (as well other kinds of projects) for the LW community. If you're interested in doing this kind of work, you might run into a problem that is best solved by good outside assistance. Without assistance you might get discouraged and stop working on the project or never even start it. We want to help you avoid that. Do you
- Not know how to interpret a finding and want help figuring it out?
- Need access to a particular paper and need someone with a library subscription to download it for you?
- Need someone to edit your writing?
- Not even know what you're having trouble with, but you know is that you're stuck and need someone to troubleshoot you?
Then, we want to help!
How do you request such help? For now, I think the best way is to post to the discussion section about your problem. That way other interested people can also provide help and be interested in your research. If you feel uncomfortable doing this, you may post to the public goods team mailing list (lw-public-goods-team@googlegroups.com) or if it's not too long after this was posted, post in the comments.
I personally commit to doing at least 3 hours a week of tasks like these for people doing LessWrong related projects (assuming demand for it; I'll be keeping a log) for at least the next month. Morendil has committed to doing at least an hour of this and atucker has promised to some as well.
Our goal is to find out whether this kind of help is effective and encourages people. If this kind of assistance turns out to be valuable, we'll continue to offer it.
If you would like to volunteer some time (a little or a lot), say so in the comments!
Two resources (I've rot13ed the names and URLs):
Yvoenel Trarfvf (yvotra.bet) – This enormous book repository has been mentioned a few times before on LW. yvotra.bet and tra.yvo.ehf.rp (you need a non-US VPN/proxy to access these) are the official mirrors. A list of mirrors operated by others can be found through Download -> Mirrors (and in the grandchild comment below).
Fpv-Uho (fpv-uho.bet) – This offers proxy access through ~20 different university libraries. It worked well on a few papers that I wasn't able to access otherwise. This should be especially useful if you don't normally have VPN access to a library. (If the current proxy doesn't have access to your paper, just click the refresh icon on the right to switch to another proxy.) Again, looks like you'll need a non-US IP.
Also, I acquired a copy of FineReader and would be happy to OCR any scanned paper or book that you have (I've tried some open-source and free online alternatives and found them lacking). Just leave a comment here as usual.
I will be applying OCR by default to future requests that I receive as scanned documents. This includes some image manipulation (deskewing, contrast enhancing, etc.) and lossy compression (in general, the final product is more readable than the original, despite the compression). Let me know if you don't want these applied and prefer the original un-OCRed scan.
I'm a little confused. The first two links redirect to books.google.com for me. Is that cause I'm in the US? What's the best way to read more about Library Genesis?
Sci-hub.org redirects to myescience.org, is that correct?