For Biomed articles, Pubmed (pubmed.gov) offers free access to articles over a year old as of 2008, and sometimes sooner. Also, I often find it handy to google the full article name or the author, as many times authors may have posted a copy on their webpages.
A few things you may not be aware of in science publishing (at least for my area, biomed):
-The journals argued main role is to peer review research and distribute it. To do so, they engage researchers to act as peer reviewers, who take uncompensated time to do so.
- Journal articles are often noted as "advertisements" because the authors must actually pay for their publication, usually a 1-3K or so. Additional charges for color figures and such. This is not limited to non-profit journals. Some journals have an immediate open access option, which for a higher publication fee, your article can be fully publicly available as soon as its published. Also, NIH grants now allow for some request for publication fees and some universities have programs to aid a research in paying the additional costs of publishing open access immediately.
- With many journals, you must give up your copyright to the material to the journal. So, if you'd like to use a figure you made of your data in another context (grant application, review publication, dissertation, website, book, etc) you have to seek approval from the journal.
- More recently (2008), if you get funding from the NIH, you must deposit a copy of your publication into PubMed Central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) within 12 months of publication. Now, 12 months is a ridiculous amount of time in science really, but at least it's progress.
By the way, although universities generally provide "free" access to many journals, they also pay ridiculous amounts of money to offer access to those journals that are not open access.
Science publishing (at least, biomed) is currently going through the same growing pains in the digital era that many paper-based businesses are going through (newspapers, magazines). Their main business is two-fold really, 1) disseminating research and 2) peer-reviewing research. The internet make #1 largely obsolete. They now act primarily as a filter for "interestingness" and as a prestige-meter. There are many arguments that the current model for #2 is highly outdated, but the funding agencies (eg., government) and scientists as whole are generally a pretty conservative crowd that is resistant to change.
Some are (PLoS (http://www.plos.org), BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/), many small highly specialized journals), but overall many publishers still are similar to magazines.
A few things you may not be aware of in science publishing (at least for my area, biomed):
-The journals argued main role is to peer review research and distribute it. To do so, they engage researchers to act as peer reviewers, who take uncompensated time to do so.
- Journal articles are often noted as "advertisements" because the authors must actually pay for their publication, usually a 1-3K or so. Additional charges for color figures and such. This is not limited to non-profit journals. Some journals have an immediate open access option, which for a higher publication fee, your article can be fully publicly available as soon as its published. Also, NIH grants now allow for some request for publication fees and some universities have programs to aid a research in paying the additional costs of publishing open access immediately.
- With many journals, you must give up your copyright to the material to the journal. So, if you'd like to use a figure you made of your data in another context (grant application, review publication, dissertation, website, book, etc) you have to seek approval from the journal.
- More recently (2008), if you get funding from the NIH, you must deposit a copy of your publication into PubMed Central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/) within 12 months of publication. Now, 12 months is a ridiculous amount of time in science really, but at least it's progress.
By the way, although universities generally provide "free" access to many journals, they also pay ridiculous amounts of money to offer access to those journals that are not open access.
Science publishing (at least, biomed) is currently going through the same growing pains in the digital era that many paper-based businesses are going through (newspapers, magazines). Their main business is two-fold really, 1) disseminating research and 2) peer-reviewing research. The internet make #1 largely obsolete. They now act primarily as a filter for "interestingness" and as a prestige-meter. There are many arguments that the current model for #2 is highly outdated, but the funding agencies (eg., government) and scientists as whole are generally a pretty conservative crowd that is resistant to change.