I'm a research engineer in mechanical engineering. I hear about open access from time to time but it's still very fringe. Some journals offer the option of the

I'm a research engineer in mechanical engineering. I hear about open access from time to time but it's still very fringe. Some journals offer the option of the author paying a fee in exchange for their paper being published as OA, but from my experience not many PIs see the value in this, and prefer to use their grant dollars for other things. Sci-hub has been a huge help though. Our library subscriptions cover probably 80-90% of what I'm interested in and scihub covers the vast majority of the remaining fraction. For the last 1 or 2 %, I turn to emailing friends/contacts in other universities to ask them if they have a subscription and can get me a copy. Our library also offers the same service (inter library loans for papers) but charges 2$ and has a 1-2 week delay.