Becoming a Professional III

Accessing scholarly articles is often difficult, as many are kept behind a paywall and only accessible through a subscription (personal or through a library). 

Open Access is a movement that provides research results in an open format, so anyone with internet access can read the information.  Some faculty will make their research available through an open access journal, but there are also mandates for researchers whose funding was provided through a government agency (e.g. NIH (National Institutes of Health) or NSF (National Science Foundation)) that require access to the scholarly outputs from that research be made accessible one year after publication. 

There are several options to seeing if you can find an open access article about your research area:

A lot of researchers are now making the last copy of their materials (before formatting and final editing by the journal) available in their institutional repositories.  At Virginia Tech, we have "VTechWorks" (indexed in Google Scholar, as are many other institutional repositories, but unfortunately there isn't a way to narrow your search to those entities).

And finally:

Some publishers (Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, etc.) will have "hybrid" journals where authors can pay to make their articles open, even though the journal is traditionally accessible only through a subscription.  Look for an "unlocked" padlock, or "green" (for go) icon that indicates the material is openly available.