[vlasev]

It's often such a PITA to find free research papers if you don't have access to the paid journals. If it's just one paper, it's not such a big issue. The trouble is one of scale. A researcher usually puts a lot of time into looking for all the references and papers to read. If this researcher doesn't have direct free access to these papers and has to look them up on google every time, this increases the overhead significantly. We're talking about dozens of papers just to get started well on a topic.

Here's an example. When I did math research last summer at my university, I looked at 16 papers. It took a while to gather these even with my university account with which I obtained the articles for free. If I had to google every single article, it would have taken me much more time - at least double if not triple the time.