Nobody likes paywalls.

However, if you’ve been tasked to write a paper in school or have tried searching for more technical explanations when you write for a blog, you would undoubtedly have faced a paywall scarier than those monthly subscription news websites or blogs — the paywall of an academic journal.

Unlike the $0.50 per week subscription to The New York Times and Wall Street Journal or the $5 per month fee to be a Medium member (all 3 of which become even cheaper if you subscribe annually), academic journals are expensive.

When faced with a paywall, you might find yourself staring at a price tag of between $20 to $60 per article (of course, these are longer than your typical news or blog article) if you don’t have a subscription to that particular academic journal. And subscriptions are not cheap either. Many specialized journals (think of each like niche sites not unlike Bloomberg, In-Fisherman Magazine, and Vogue) charge more than $5000 a year.

Furthermore, since researchers have to look for research from different sources (one cannot just cite all the papers from a single academic journal — much like how we should read from different news sources to ensure that we understand different perspectives), the cost balloons quickly.

For example, a researcher in Iran found that because his university had poor access to journals, he would have to pay around $1000 a week to read the papers he wanted to access for his research.

While you might think that the problem faced by the researcher in Iran is limited to poorly funded universities, even world-renowned universities like Havard are struggling to afford all the journal subscriptions.

There are many reasons why reading academia is expensive with the biggest reason being a small readership.

While mainstream news and blogs have a wider audience while being able to publish a wide variety of content to attract readers, academic journals are