Writers write, and readers read. But the world is not that simple: it has e-walls between the writers and readers, walls that we have all helped to build. So we should not complain.

When a writer publishes a paper in a journal, most likely he has made a decision to give away his copyright to the journal. In most cases, he cannot post the reprint online. iMechanica will honor the decision of the writer, as well as the copyright of the journal.

Here are several alternative methods to effect communication. To be completely safe and avoid all hassles, you can always use method 1 and ignore all the rest.

1. Cite the paper with no hyperlinks, as you would do in writing a journal paper. If you give the full title of the paper, the reader can paste the title into Google Scholar to access the full text of the paper. (To do so, the reader needs to localize Google Scholar to her own institution.)

2. If a journal is open access (e.g., the PloS journals), you can simply make a hyperlink to an individual paper in the journal. For example, here is a paper on the mechanics of hearing.

3. Most journals are not open access, but most of them allow authors to post preprints. If this is the case, you can upload your preprint to iMechanica by using the "File attachments" button beneath the posting window. If you are unsure of the status of any journal, please check its permission.

4. Make a hyperlink to the paper on the web site of the journal. Be sure that the URL is accessible outside your institution. To do so, you should sign out the proxy server of your institution, or simply remove the proxy string from the URL of the paper.

5. Give the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). Each paper published in recent years has a DOI. For example, here is the DOI of a paper, 10.1063/1.2357569, which can be found in the paper and on the web page of the paper. The reader can locate the paper by the link http://dx.doi.org/the_DOI_of_a_ paper; for example, http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2357569. If you use this kind of URL in your post, you reader can read your paper without leaning about DOI.

If you use methods 4 and 5, when a reader clicks the hyperlink, she will land on a web page that contains the abstract. To access the full paper, she will have to insert the proxy string of her own institution into the URL.