For a while, I was (sometimes) busting patents at Google. That meant searching through literally 1000's of articles to see if one or more provided prior art to

For a while, I was (sometimes) busting patents at Google. That meant searching through literally 1000's of articles to see if one or more provided prior art to invalidate some patent being asserted against us. Quite often, an article would be behind a paywall (and btw, @throwawaaarrgh, it was often Springer or Taylor, not Elsevier). We'd gladly pay $30 for it if it did the job, but nothing to just find out IF it did. And 99% of the time, it didn't. So I never paid. Nearly always, the professor published something else on the same topic that was open access.