More than a few are freely available. But, FWIW, the IEEE and ACM are notorious for charging ridiculous fees to access their papers, if you're not a member. However, individual membership in both organizations is relatively inexpensive (it's journal subscriptions that quickly drive up the price), and can be worthwhile if you find yourself accessing a lot of academic papers of this sort.

My take is that ACM, IEEE and AAAI are all worth maintaining memberships with, especially if you want to stay up to date on what's going on at an academic level. Maybe the biggest advantage of being a member of these orgs, other than access to archived papers, is that subscriptions to their journals is much cheaper if you're a member. YMMV, of course.

On a related note, at least one of IEEE, AAAI or ACM have a discount program for journals published by other outfits, like Springer. Some deal like "join ACM, and your subscription to $FOO from Springer is heavily discounted." If you like to subscribe to journals and what-not, check out all these offers, as they can bring the prices down to where an individual can actually afford them, whereas normally you'd find the price to be so high that only an institution could really justify it.

This is a nice service the ACM offers, though authors have to take advantage of it for it to work: http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service

I see it more as an appeal from the ACM to authors to keep the ACM in the loop. Personally, I see it as a hassle, so no thanks.

If the ACM removed the paywall, I would link directly to the proper page for each of my papers - there's excellent meta information on those pages, like who we cite and who cites us. As well as author links which link to other papers written by those authors.

I really want to somehow lobby the ACM and IEEE to remove their paywalls (I am a member of both), but I have neither the time nor the knowledge of how to be most effective.

If you look to the right of most of the google scholar links is another link that says "PDF at <site>" and you can download it from there. Very useful.

Try punching the paper's title/author/etc into Google Scholar and CiteSeer to find other freely available copies. This works very well in CS, math, and physics, but is hit-or-miss in the "soft" sciences.

Hire someone part-time who's still enrolled in uni and use their subscription :P

it's a hassle but if you google the author's name, chances are high that you'll find their webpage that links to the pdf of the paper. They're likely to also have other resources like videos, and related reading.

- published draft versions are often just called draft for legal reasons and content-wise identical to the final versions

- http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/ has a public "cached" version of many papers that aren't publicly available on other sites.

Also, if there is some paper you just can't find, you could try posting its name (or a link to the paywalled site) here. There lots of academic people on HN. Someone here may be able to help you out.

I think all research should be made freely available. The current situation is just sad.

If you can't find it on the web, email the authors. It's highly likely that they'll send you a copy.

I clicked on a few of the paper titles and they led me to a direct download link off google scholar. Maybe not every paper is free this way but it was for the papers I clicked on.

check on http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/index and xxx.lanl.gov .

Thank you. That works!

You can sometimes find the papers in open access directly by googling, or by looking at the author's webpage. If it doesn't work, try to email the authors. If you know someone who has an account on a university network with the relevant subscriptions, ask them.