Update: in September 2021, the link format changed. Now you should use https://login.cmu.idm.oclc.org/login?url= instead.
Many academic papers behind paywalls can be easily accessed with the CMU library proxy. (Of course, you need to log in with your university credentials.) The easiest way to do this is to simply prepend the URL with
https://login.proxy.library.cmu.edu/login?url=For example, the paper at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/273865.273901 can accessed at
https://login.proxy.library.cmu.edu/login?url=https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/273865.273901This is not a secret or anything, but it’s a useful trick that doesn’t seem to be extremely well-advertised on the CMU Libraries website, which suggests a slightly different (and less convenient) way of using the proxy. I’m just putting this up here because I need the link somewhere, and perhaps it will be useful to someone else in the future.
I feel like this is a pretty general thing about CMU: they offer so many great resources, but many of them are not very widely advertised to the student body.1 Except for the bus and arts passes. They wouldn’t stop reminding us about those during orientation week. (Although they are legitimately really useful!)
For example, I don’t think many know about the free web hosting. Just put something under the www directory on the Andrew Linux timeshare machines, and it’ll pop up under http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~ericzhen/ (obviously with your Andrew ID instead of mine). This service is hosted by the Computer Club; the university computing services hosts a similar one, but that one you have to explicitly publish every time you make a change.↩︎