I have noticed that some requests for scholarly articles from colleagues on RG and some by private emails (though published mostly not on open access status), are always turned down stating that those articles cannot be shared, even privately. I want to know the reason(s) because to me, this attitude seems to be detrimental to the development of young and research-oriented researchers from developing/under developed countries. I believe strongly that studies in developed countries/regions with adequate cutting edge techniques need to be readily available to researchers in the South for global scientific development. Many Universities in the South are not well-funded to the extent that it will be hard to make subscriptions for these highly-rated scholarly journal outlets and I believe if scientists from these developed nations can be magnanimous enough to provide these findings to researchers in the South, these will go a long way in improving Science &Technology of the South.
With the recent mass action against ResearchGate by publishers, I think access papers might get more complicated in the future. Copyright laws make it hard to freely distribute one's own research. However, publishers like Springer have developed an innovative technique to allow easy distribution called ShareIt. But for other journals, it's only going to be tough.
I think that different publishers have different policies on that: some even provide links to the full text one can sent to colleagues and other interested people for up to 90 days, others have an embargo of one or two years before the publication can put on repositories. The pre-print version is often free to be posted right from the beginning.
So practices are rather varied and whoever wants that his / her paper gets much impact and distribution should look at the relevant policies of the publishers.
In some occasions we, as authors, would like to publish open access but for doing so many journals ask for a fee...
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