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Dependent-Law7316 t1_iy875d4 wrote

Reply to comment by Jkei in ELI5: why scientific reasearch are not free to public by Purple_zither

Yes I can confirm this. I haven’t made a cent off any of my publications. The papers that are available for free are from “open access” programs, where the researchers probably paid a fee to make the work available for free instead of having it behind the standard pay wall. It os becoming more common for funding agencies to require that you make the work freely available.

That said, your public library probably either has or can get any paper you want, it just might take a bit to do an inter library “loan” of the article. Or email the corresponding author. Many (not all) are willing to send you a copy.

In the land of chemistry and physics, ArXiv is a popular way to accomplish satisfying funding agency open access requirements without having to pay the journals extra.

Source: am also in academia

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Jkei t1_iy8ar4y wrote

ArXiv is a big one. I'm in life sciences, and we're seeing the same with medRxiv and bioRxiv. For all the harm it did, the pandemic did much to drive adoption of these platforms. Though I feel many people still think of them as more of a stepping stone to that coveted Nature publication, etc.

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