[drallison]

The cost of publication and the cost of access are both significant factors in scientific publication, but the major issue is quantity. Most fields are overwhelmed by the volume of publications.Individual papers tend contain only a small amount of new material and a lot of redundant information. Because there are so many, most papers, even important papers, are not read by very many people. What's needed is a curated channel that filters and deprecates noise and identifies the gems. But, even if we had that, we'd be complaining that serendipitous discoveries and correlations are masked by the process. Arguing about the costs makes some sense. I personally get angry when some paywall asks me for $15 or more to view a two page paper. But the real problem is finding a way to minimize the noise and get the gems to people who will find them beautiful.

[CapitalistCartr]

You can have your cake and eat it, too, with open-source publication. A Google-style search engine can give you a custom search of papers to allow bot good filtration, and cross-pollination. The key is for the papers to be open.

[reeses]

Google Scholar is pretty good for indexing the major libraries/journals, but you still run into the paywalls in places.

It also turns up copies of paid papers that someone has stored in a public web/ftp server. Usually it's a student obviously working on a project. I must admit that I've used these on occasion to decide if a paper is worth buying.

[mjn]

I guess it depends on your personal views, but I don't find much wrong with just using these articles. Some people even leave them "accidentally" open not really by accident (I have some colleagues who conspicuously fail to take much care to keep Google out of indexing their course reading lists).

If you really want to cross your t's legally and still not pay, you can almost always email the author and ask for a copy, and they are typically authorized by their publication agreement to privately send you a preprint. So in practice just using a version you found online is not much different, except that you save the author some time responding to your request for the same PDF by email.

[reeses]

Everyone wants the citation. Good point. :)