The US government pays at least $50,000 in grant money for each paper, but it can't find $5 to make it available for the public in perpetuity, as does the arXiv.org preprint server.

(arXiv.org looks, on the surface, to be a success, but always been functioning on operating budgets that are meant for something else... It's existence has hung on a thread more than once It still struggles to find a sustainable funding model, despite the fact that it costs 1/200-1/1000 as much to make papers available on arXiv.org as does a peer reviewed paper)

Frankly it seems to be an insult to the taxpayer that we pay for research and can't read it/

$50k/paper is about right. I was surprised to find that even my colleagues didn't know this figure. If only more people were aware of it, perhaps they'd take things more seriously.

The feeling of powerlessness as an individual trapped in the system is only exacerbated by the apparent callousness of those around you.

This is definitely the case with all bio/medical research; isn't like this in computer science and other sciences too? Is the publishers lobby so powerful?

For much more on the NIH policy, see the links in this article: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/12/oa-mandate-at-nih...

There has been a concerted (though not yet successful) effort to extend this type of open access mandate to all US federal agencies with budgets over 100 million. See, for example: http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/frpaa/index.shtml

With a lot of work, I believe these efforts are likely to be successful. But there is real opposition, not just from some journal publishers, but also from some politicians. See, for example, the efforts by John Conyers (D-Mi) to roll back the NIH open access policy: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/10-02-08.htm#n...

In the UK, all seven UK Research Councils have similar open access policies. The last one to adopt such a policy was the Physical Sciences and Engineering Council, which I believe is the one relevant to computer science research. That policy was adopted in 2009, I believe, and so we're only starting to see the effects now.

As for the opposition from politicians: isn't this a typical case of lobbies trying to hide behind some representative of choice to fight their battle?

I think this rule is specific to the funding agency.

In the last several years there's been maybe half a dozen times that I failed to find a computer science paper online. I'd estimate that less than 1% of papers in the top conferences are unavailable freely online.

As a last resort, mail to the authors.

[0] http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1878921.1878926 [1] http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publication.php?id=buchwald1... [2] http://pp.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/publications.php?orderby=1&#...

This depends very much on the age of the paper. The older it is, the less likely that it is on the web. If anything it reinforces the profound cyclical amnesia of our industry (never mind academia).