Not wishing to sound facetious, but where would I get the PDFs, other than from - say - SciHub?
I have the original bound journal for one of them, but you can bet your bottom dollar it would be illegal for me to start making photocopies of my work and handing them out...
A good point actually - from a legal perspective this is tricky. Generally the publisher claims copyright over the arrangement that is "published". Photocopying the printed version would therefore be problematic.
With digital formats, the general approach is to export a PDF from LaTeX (or whatever is used to write the paper) as an author pre-print copy (i.e. not in the final form used by the journal), and publish that one. From a technical legal perspective you would likely need to look at what agreement you signed with the publisher at the time (if any), since that may restrict distribution of the text.
This raises a good point though for works that were pre-open access, and the risk of them "rotting" behind paywalls out of being in a state of legal limbo. Newer science will be more accessible due to open access rules, but older science may end up effectively "lost" to those without access to these paywalled repositories.
There's no real incentive for those publishers to open things up, as they rely on institutions paying large subscriptions to preserve access to the legacy archived content, and that keeps their many thousands of staff employed.
Actually, this depends on the terms defined by each particular journal or conference to which the work is submitted. While things have gotten better in recent years, traditionally even distribution on personal websites is technically not allowed, just selectively enforced, again depending on the venue and even the exposure of the particular work or lab group.
When enforcement is more strict, researchers sometimes resort to hosting a draft of their manuscript, and not the final camera ready version.
Unfortunately, in many fields open access or even just personal hosting and is still uncommon, and the vast majority of papers remain behind paywalls.
Also depends on your jurisdiction. In the Netherlands, researchers are allowed to make their own works available to anyone six months after publication, regardless of their publisher's terms: https://www.openaccess.nl/en/in-the-netherlands/you-share-we...
Of course, it's not perfect since it still requires work on the part of the author, but all they have to do is give it to a university library and they'll make sure it's available as soon as it's allowed.
The poster [1] refers to "the published version", so yes, the PDF of the published article. But Dutch researchers who are interested can probably best just get in touch with their library, who I'm sure will be able to tell them exactly what they need.
