The Philosophical Underclass Group
The Philosophical Underclass is a Facebook group of philosophers who request and provide electronic copies of philosophical works from and to each other. It is the idea of Kevin Timpe (Northwest Nazarene University), who explains how it came about:
I work at a university that has very poor journal access. The librarians are great at getting me just about anything via inter-library loan (ILL), but it can take 4-7 days. I often posted a link to a journal article I wanted on Facebook, and those friends with better access than I would email me a PDF of the article in question. Thomas Nadelhoffer suggested I make a FB dedicated to such requests, and the Philosophical Underclass was born. It’s our very own peer-to-peer ILL service. It had over 100 members within 24 hours and is currently up to 270. It’s been a great help to those of who don’t have good e-journal access.
If you are interested in becoming a member of the Philosophical Underclass, go to their Facebook page and click “join group.”
This might be a good place for a reminder that most journals allow posting of post-print or pre-print versions in repositories like SSRN and scholars should consider making their work available in this way. Posting your papers in this format allows everyone — academic philosophers with underfunded libraries, but also people unconnected with academic institutions and those in other countries — access.
Posting also allows those with access through ILL or the trading described here to get a very quick sense of whether a paper is worth pursuing through these mechanisms.
There are several good repositories but I like SSRN: http://www.ssrn.com. For quick info about which publishers/journals allow what, see here: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/