College Students Can't Access Research! The Trouble with Pay Walls...

Last week I was doing research at school for a writing class project. I had found a few good journal articles on my subject via Google Scholar. My professor suggested that I dig through the references list of an article we already had to find some good source material, which sounded like a good idea. There were probably fifty or sixty references listed in the article I chose. I typed the name of the first article into Google Scholar and clicked the title. Then I looked for the full version of the article, which I should’ve been able to access through our university library’s server.

No dice.

“Your academic institution does not currently subscribe to this journal. Please contact them to gain access to the full version of this article,” it told me. Something like that.

It was the same message for about 50% of the sources referenced in that article. Despite the fact that I was on campus at a world-renowned research university, doing actual *research,* I could not access sources I needed to fact-check this paper.

This is something that has been on my mind for a couple of weeks now, and I can’t shake it. I get that businesses can do essentially whatever they want to in our economy, and that organizations with large profits often fail to care about the effects of their money-making systems. They aren’t required to be ethical. But I believe this practice as the somewhat unethical hindrance of scientific progress, and it drives me mad.