I'm considering going in the direction of independent AI alignment research, at least for the next few months. So I was wondering - how does one get access to resources usually provided by a university?
Things like:
- Paywalled journal articles
- Compute infrastructure
- Conference funding
And if that fails, you can usually contact the authors directly. Most academics are happy to have people interested in their work, and papers will have a corresponding author with an email address. Though obviously this method is only worth the bother if it's a really valuable paper for you.
See here for a similar discussion on accessing articles as an independent researcher. TLDR: The Unpaywall extension is a good alternative to scihub because it links to legal Green Open Access version of articles (and scihub is a bit intermittent with uploading new content). There are other options, but most are less efficient than these two.
A similar resource for books: Libgen