The latter is a point that's often forgotten, and is very true. I used to do research a long time ago, prior to deciding I'm not quite academia material. If I ever get nostalgic, I literally have to pay between 30 USD and 100 USD just to get PDFs of articles that I wrote.
Of course, this is upsetting only on a personal level, but the entire process is extremely toxic to learning.
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.
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).
Disclaimers: I live in another country, and I research in digital forensics -- that has quite an open community.
In my situation, I've never reached anywhere near that point. All my works are available for donwload as PDFs, and even if they weren't, my research group keeps a repository where we can re-download/point/email anyone who asks for them.
We haven't published in IEEE journals (yet), but as of our countrys law, we are the authors, and we hold rights to our work (for example, distribution) as we see fit. As a matter of fact, per a "new" law (it's a few years old, but it's becoming effective now), we have to keep that institutional repository I mentioned earlier.
My question is: how is your situation, and how were you forced into this ridicule thing of having to pay for your own work?!
Mine was in electromagnetism. Far less open. I don't live in the US, either, so perhaps the legal situation here would allow me some recourse. I just didn't care enough to investigate, academia is something I've long put behind me :-).
As for your questions:
1. There are publishers which require you to relinquish all your rights to distribution, copying etc.. In other words, they basically own every right to the final work. This is usually circumvented by just distributing the latest draft for free. IIRC, one of our papers was published in such a journal. We did receive a copy of the journal, which I obviously don't have, it's in our lab's library.
2. For the others, there's no way for me to say "oh, hi, I'm this paper's author, can I please have a copy?", and in at least one case, we didn't receive a copy of the journal it was published in. Some publishers are nice and give you a pre-print PDF of the article, so that you can actually substantiate your claim that you published it if your institution requires more detailed bookkeeping. But many skip straight to giving you the middle finger and telling you how you can buy the journal if you want it.
I'm hesitant to give publishers' names because this was long enough ago that a) my memory is a little foggy and b) things I say may no longer apply.
So basically, at this point, neither me, nor my former colleagues have physical copies of the journals themselves. I didn't care enough to save the PDFs (nor am I likely to care soon -- that's why I only find it funny in a moderately annoying way), and my former colleagues aren't allowed to send me the final articles in PDF format, either, at least under the paper equivalent of EULA.
Genuinely asking (not snark, and I am not a physicist): what does it mean to conduct research in "electromagnetism" more than a century after Maxwell? Did you study superconductivity? Electrical power beaming? Magnetic properties of weird alloys?
I ask only because I thought people who study these things are more likely to say they research "electrical engineering" (if they want to be general and applied), or "condensed matter physics" or maybe "materials science".
I'm really just curious about the relevant terminology / sociology of academia.
Uh :-). I said electromagnetism because it sounds waaay less pretentious than what it was generally termed -- computational electromagnetism -- and because claiming it was microelectronics, while technically correct, was somewhat frowned upon at our university because we were in the wrong department for that. Politics and whatnot.
We were doing research on simulation and model extraction techniques for passive structures in very high-frequency (think 30 GHz) integrated circuits. At these frequencies, the lumped-element approximations break down, so you can't describe the functioning of passive devices in the familiar manner, based on Kirchhof's equations et co.. That means SPICE-family tools can't give you proper results anymore, and you kind of need them to design the circuit.
The "proper" way to do it is full-wave simulation; unfortunately -- especially for very wide-band devices -- that's computationally very costly (simulating the behaviour of the device at a specific frequency isn't very cheap on its own, but we're talking about simulating it for a whole range of frequencies, which could span tens of GHz). You could plug those results into SPICE, of course, but running these simulations took hours, sometimes even days, for a single run, which is completely impractical. It's also not the level you want to work at when designing circuits -- where you're solving "circuit problems", not "field problems".
So what we were trying to do was:
a) Figure out how to make the simulations faster and more accurate, and
b) Figure out how to extract a model from them, i.e. an equivalent circuit, which could be readily used by the design engineers.
We did that through a combination of things like running as few simulations as possible and extrapolating, running simulations in parallel and so on. It wasn't some major scientific breakthrough, but then again, I worked there during my 3rd and 4th year of university; it was the most difficult kind of work I'd done until that point.
a) Luckily in my field, most prestige comes from the DFRWS[0], which is open. And working on/with certain tools, most of which are also FLOSS.
b) As I understand, in my country it's impossible for an author to loose rights over his own work. However, I'm not a lawyer and can't give more specific details.
Of course, this is upsetting only on a personal level, but the entire process is extremely toxic to learning.