Everything Is Paid In This World

Good evening everyone. I hope you're all doing very well. Throughout our lives we have always heard about this research or that journal paper which describes some study or some new scientific discovery that is supposed to change the world. I'm sure you have heard about these researches. So I am in my last year as an undergraduate student and in order to graduate I need to do a thesis. For that, I need to read a lot of research papers and journals to get an idea of how the thesis is written and also to accumulate sources to cite in my own journal. I then bumped into a peculiar problem. I thought since scientists around the world always vouched for liberating education, in other words they wanted their works to be accessible to everyone. Now that I am trying to read them, I am hitting a paywall. Whenever I find an article that is relatively famous and has been cited by a lot of people, when I try to read it, I see that it is behind a paywall.

This got me thinking. I wanted to understand why this was happening and are all researches actually paid. And if they are then why do researchers always vouch for open access to knowledge? Then I tried searching on the internet and I saw that researchers always want their works to be public. As a result, they often upload their works on to sites that are publicly accessible and do not have a paywall, but not all of them upload in that way. Eventually I saw that I needed money to read almost any of the relevant research papers. Now I know that most universities around the globe maintain a subscription of all the famous journals and if you use the internet of those universities, you can easily access those researches. And you can also download them freely. But you cannot access them outside the networks. So you can get access to these papers in that way. But the question is whose idea was it to put so much human knowledge behind the paywall?

It's actually quite demoralizing to see me that nothing is actually free and everything comes at a cost when some things are best set free for the betterment of the world. Although there are free alternatives, what bugs me more is that these paid subscriptions are the correct way to do things. I mean maybe I can afford to pay as I read but that doesn't mean everyone can. So don't they have a right to learn? I guess education is the biggest privilege money can buy.