[ideonexus]

I don't think it's just on a personal level. The lack of access to journal articles is actually quite detrimental to public discourse. Last year I got into an online debate with a relative about the legacy of Rachel Carson. He was claiming that she purposefully misrepresented the findings of two journal articles to overstate the danger posed by DDT.

I wanted to see for myself, but it would cost me $45 each for these two 5-page papers that were 50-years-old. Luckily, I have a relative who is a Professor and she got me the papers, which I then directly quoted in the thread to show Carson was quoting the papers verbatim.

My relative responded by claiming I was lying. With dozens of friends and family members munching popcorn and watching our debate, the only thing I could to to defend myself was to post the papers online illegally in my defense.

I won the debate (or at least was able to walk away from it knowing nothing would convince my opponent), but in the process of researching this subject, I have found dozens of publications making the same false claims about Carson and her legacy. With few readers being able to fact-check the claims by simply having access to two 5-page 50-year-old papers the debate is complete he-said/she-said.

I fully support this civil disobedience. Defending the name of a historical figure is one thing, but when people can't get access to health research, it endangers lives.

[Lawtonfogle]

I generally reject any paper that I cannot get full access to. This is because too many times have I seen papers making claims that are not supported by their methodology, especially in more controversial or politically charged subjects. A common example is to study some socially unacceptable population, they will look to sample from known members which are often gathered due to court cases, and then they magically make generalizations to the general part of the population. Imagine if most studies of men in the US only sampled from the prison population, could those results be generalized to all men?

Given that this data tends to be locked in the methodology section, which is quick to check if I have access, I tend to outright reject the paper as I cannot trust any claims made in the abstract. Even worse are when there are papers you cannot trust at all because of overt biases of their authors (unless the findings are produced by others who do not share those biases, normally if you get people on both sides of some issue reaching the same finding you can be more confident in the results).