Every academic article has a corresponding author whose email address is listed on the first page. If an article is paywalled, just send a short, polite email requesting a PDF from the author. 95% of the time you’ll receive it within a day. People like knowing their work is being read!

Once a practicing engineer asked me for clarification to use something I wrote and I'm still high from it

Good tip but really depends on the corresponding author. Profs are very good at not replying to emails.

Unfortunately it’s not 95% 😢 but it does work sometimes

I asked for some information from a research group for my MSc thesis. The boss was so kind and gave me more than I asked for.

The financial gatekeeping of academic papers is terrible.

P.S. I usually add a sentence like “if you have other papers you think I should read, please include them.” Often an author will have more recent work related to a paper I’m requesting.

ALSO even if you do have access... you can email people to tell them their article was helpful. I've emailed some authors to be like "Hey thanks for [your article about topic] it's super clear and I use it a lot for teaching about [topic]!" The world could use more good vibes sent around.

In my field they rarely include contact details on the article itself, but it can usually be found with cursory googling and I've never had an author say no when I asked for help finding their work! Several have sent me multiple related articles when I asked for one.

Unfortunately there are many reluctant to risk retaliation by Elsevier.

Yes!! I do this all the time and people are always happy to share their work.