Disclaimers: I live in another country, and I research in digital forensics -- that has quite an open community.<p>In my situation, I&#x27;ve never reached anywhere near that point. All my works are available for donwload as PDFs, and even if they weren&#x27;t, my research group keeps a repository where we can re-download&#x2F;point&#x2F;email anyone who asks for them.<p>We haven&#x27;t published in IEEE journals (yet), but as of our countrys law, we are the authors, and we hold rights to our work (for example, distribution) as we see fit. As a matter of fact, per a &quot;new&quot; law (it&#x27;s a few years old, but it&#x27;s becoming effective now), we <i>have</i> to keep that institutional repository I mentioned earlier.<p>My question is: how is your situation, and how were you forced into this ridicule thing of having to pay for your own work?!