All citizens have a right to know the output of academic research funded through public money. However, the pay-walls between the research output and readers have become much more formidable barriers in recent years. Authors and/or their institutions, and readers thus have to shell out substantial money to access the published results while commercial publishers make very high profit. Do researchers and readers really need to spend the hard-to-get research funds for open access when any published paper can be available to the desiring reader through email exchanges between reader and author involving request for, and sharing of the pdf file?