This is a weird edge case. - For most academic articles, the audience is almost entirely other academics with institutional access. If so, getting a paywalled

This is a weird edge case. - For most academic articles, the audience is almost entirely other academics with institutional access. If so, getting a paywalled article usually just requires signing into the VPN and reloading the page. If your university has a subscription--and it likely does to "core" journals, you're good to go. If not... - Funders have been pushing for "open access" to research findings. Work funded by the US government needs to be freely available online within a year of publication. You should therefore either be able to access the article text somehow, either through the journal itself, a preprint server (arXiv or one of its offshoots), or a repository (PubMed Central, DTIC, etc). - On top of that, most labs do have webpages that contain their publications. Google scholar is pretty good at finding them too. This covers ~99.9% of cases, and they're all instant once you know how to use them. My point in the original comment was if that these fail, you should shoot the authors an email instead of paying. A few publishers do hold a fairly hard line against publicly posting an article, but even they typically allow you to provide a copy "on request". Also, in case it's not clear, academic publishing is only partly about actually disseminating information. A huge part is getting the "imprimatur" of peer review generally, and from certain journals specifically. A brilliant self-hosted document might impress people within a very specific subfield that are motivated and able to evaluate the work. However, its value will be unclear to others who fund/hire/evaluate you. The Dean, for example, likely has neither has the background nor the time to decide if your technical blog merits tenure. He/she does know that Nature is very selective, publishing there means that your work is held in high regard by your field, and therefore you deserve tenure. This holds true for funders too. It's not a great system in many regards, but it is how things currently work.