Mine was in electromagnetism. Far less open. I don&#x27;t live in the US, either, so perhaps the legal situation here would allow me some recourse. I just didn&#x27;t care enough to investigate, academia is something I&#x27;ve long put behind me :-).<p>As for your questions:<p>1. There are publishers which require you to relinquish all your rights to distribution, copying etc.. In other words, they basically own every right to the final work. This is usually circumvented by just distributing the latest draft for free. IIRC, one of our papers was published in such a journal. We did receive <i>a</i> copy of the journal, which I obviously don&#x27;t have, it&#x27;s in our lab&#x27;s library.<p>2. For the others, there&#x27;s no way for me to say &quot;oh, hi, I&#x27;m this paper&#x27;s author, can I please have a copy?&quot;, and in at least one case, we didn&#x27;t receive a copy of the journal it was published in. Some publishers are nice and give you a pre-print PDF of the article, so that you can actually substantiate your claim that you published it if your institution requires more detailed bookkeeping. But many skip straight to giving you the middle finger and telling you how you can buy the journal if you want it.<p>I&#x27;m hesitant to give publishers&#x27; names because this was long enough ago that a) my memory is a little foggy and b) things I say may no longer apply.<p>So basically, at this point, neither me, nor my former colleagues have physical copies of the journals themselves. I didn&#x27;t care enough to save the PDFs (nor am I likely to care soon -- that&#x27;s why I only find it funny in a moderately annoying way), and my former colleagues aren&#x27;t allowed to send me the final articles in PDF format, either, at least under the paper equivalent of EULA.