i was just wondering, i have been helping out for years and received several bages. there are also links to those certain researches that i helped with. my question is, do volunteers that assisted greatly with those researches still have to purchase those publications? and is there any recognitions to us volunteers in those documents? it seems a bit odd if we, volunteers, still have to pay to accesss the researches we help to create and there is no recognition given in those documents. not every volunteer names but as a group from Boinc at least. you guys feel me?

...well, that is a fundamental problem existing for decades in scientific publishing:

1. Researchers have to apply for funds to pursue their research ideas (most applications are declined, by the way - and to start a project you need to demonstrate promising, previous work in your grant application - so, TRUELY NOVEL research with high risk and no prior results (which in turn require funds: so, this is where "the cat bites in its tail" as we say in Germany) will virtually never be funded).

2. When publishable results accumulate (after successfiul grant acquisition), researchers have to pay to get these results published in a (hopefully a well-known, reputated) scientific journal (unless you want to publish in your own's university archive - which nobody knows of and nobody reads). We are talking about thousands of dollars per paper with extra fees for color images. So, the publisher asks the researcher for money to sustain their business model - even in case of OpenAccess publications (theres are even more costly to the researcher, because:).

3. Once that paper is produced, the publisher again asks for money such that people like you can read the work (around $50 per article) - that, by the way, is research results which most likely YOU have funded in the first place as most science funding is granted through tax payers money.

Isn' t that "cool"?
Not.

Well, to answer your question:
You can get your hands on any scientific paper by writing an email to that paper's corresponding author and asking for a free re-print or you just walk to your next local university library and download it there (in case they have payed the publisher ONCE AGAIN to have that journal in their public catalog, of course...).

Michael.

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President of Rechenkraft.net - Germany's first and largest distributed computing organization.