Staying current isn't easy. There are different methods and among the most common are Really Simple Syndication feeds known as RSS. You register and the new content comes to you. Sources of such feeds include scholarly organizations and societies, publishers, newspapers, library sites and blogs. RSS feeds include text-based content as well as audio capturing via podcasts and lectures and even videos or vodcasts. The news media provide RSS feeds for rapidly changing content posted to their sites as digital coverage is increasingly used. Blogs amplify some alerts and can be added to your RSS feed reader too.
A RSS feed reader or aggegator that manages your subscriptions or registrations is helpful. Many scholars rely upon Feedly which is a basic website and is also available as an app for Android and iOS but your web browser like Firefox or Safari is likely to have built-in RSS aggegators.
There are many different tools that you can register for to get alerts about new issues & releases and new content on special topics. A good, thorough overview of Alert Services: A How-To-Guide (Iowa State University) contains very useful information. The following list is combined for both alerts by topic in most of the databases and some of the platforms, otherwise it is by specific journal. Basically you receive Tables of Contents eMailed directly to you. Many journals also broadcast new content on Twitter or via RSS feeds. Some are features in databases and publishers' platforms and others are independent pieces of software. Among them are:
A good, thorough overview of Alert Services: A How-To-Guide (Iowa State University) contains very useful information.
A preprint is an academic journal article in draft form, prior to peer review. A postprint is a name given to a journal article once it has been peer reviewed. Both of these types of documents are known collectively as eprints. Preprints allow you to access th latest research, without having to wait for a paper to be peer reviewed, accepted, revised and published. The engineering landscape is still slim.
The OA release in January 2022 of Preprints: Their Evolving Role in Science Communication is highly recommended.
Many institutions and labs run journal clubs to share readings and research strategies and findings. Some examples include:
To retrieve the fulltext, most of these databases contain the UC eLinks 
icon that matches our holdings and provides link to content if we have it or a link to REQUEST to get via ILL or Document Supply. Otherwise an embedded link to a pdf or a publisher's icon is occasionally found.
There are different forms of OA (Gold, Green and today many are hybrid, plus variations of Yellow, Blue, White that determine different policies that allow different archiving of preprint.
The UC and CDL are adding publishing partners and the current list of active Transformative Agreements is here. In order to qualify the Corresponding Author must be a UC affiliate.
There are some partial and full-text articles in Nature journals that we may not have active subscriptions to but can be found via the Nexis-Uni database. Directions to find that content follow: