Sure, in most cases, you can ask authors for a copy of their paper. However, that's not a reasonable way to distribute science. Most research requires you to s

Sure, in most cases, you can ask authors for a copy of their paper. However, that's not a reasonable way to distribute science. Most research requires you to skim through many different articles, so introducing a latency of a few hours/days each time you want to open an article makes the process unreasonable. See also: Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub