Just in case someone doesn’t know it at this point: email the authors directly, they will be more than happy to send you a copy of their paper. The authors don’t get a penny from the sale of the article and they are basically rewarded for citations, so it’s in their interest to spread the word.
Useful comment!
The meme is the other way around though. The price tag in the meme is for researchers to pay so their article gets published in the journal. And it will be an open access article, so people who want to read it won’t have to pay anything. What’s so crazy about this is the huge prize tag for publishing your paper. It cannot be that costly to run an online journal.
Additionally, you can find the preprint of many articles for free (e.g., arXiv). Not the exact article, but often very similar.
(Only tangentially related to the meme, which is about publishing costs.)
The price tag is a joke.
I don’t get why publishers get paid either by the researchers or the users, when their service is minimal compared to the researchers or peer reviewers, who don’t get paid at all.
What service do they even provide at this point? Web hosting? Formatting? Proofreading? These are not particularly expensive services. Can’t we just create our own low cost or free publishers?
To be fair, real proofreading is no easy task. You need someone proficient in that field of study to really do that, but as recent AI-escapades showed, none of those publishers do that anymore.
The pricy thing is the establishment of a journal. A new journal, particularly a cheap one will get only crap articles, and because it has only crap articles, it won’t get better. Neither from the side of referees, nor authors. In some countries it is not even relevant how successful your article is. It only counts how “fancy” the journal is (according to some outdated ministry list)
And btw, researchers don’t pay for that. Subscription journals are payed by University licences and open access articles are payed by project funds, which also pay the researchers. You don’t get any less salary because of an expensive journal. You just might not be able to publish all your work as open access.