It's too bad on a site that exists for upstarts and tech minded folk looking for a way to monetize their projects people complain that good interesting content costs money. /rant
The links to research we are talking about (as opposed to journalists trying to summarize research for pop sci books) is stuff whose production is funded almost entirely by entities like governments and charities, and where the 'publisher' does not do much but enjoy exorbitant profit margins thanks to paywalls. If the publishers and their paywalls disappeared overnight, Open Access would pick up the slack pretty well. So no, monetizing is not really necessary here.
While I am glad they included (paywall), any news article or blog entry that uses sources behind a paywall should rethink using those sources. When I read an article I like to look at the sources they use to determine if the information seems valid to me.