Millions of scholarly articles on life science topics are available right now for free online.
This sounds like a spam email but its actually the result of years of National Institutes of Health policy. The NIH and other research funding sources have public access policies that require the authors make their papers available to the public for free. This far sighted policy is a research BONAZA for the savy researcher.
These full text papers are available through the NIH's PubMed Central database. You can conduct keyword searches or find papers by their citation. Though these papers are called "Author Manuscripts" and, aside from typesetting, they are identical to the published paper.
An example!
Lets say you want to see a article called "The Paradox of Probation: Community Supervision in the Age of Mass Incarceration” by Michelle Phelps published in Law and Policy.
A quick search online locates the article on the publisher's website. Purchasing this particular article from the publisher costs 15$ but this cost can run up to more than 100$ for a single article.
PUBMED to the rescue! You can search PubMed directly for the article. Google Scholar also links to PubMed articles if they are available.
Voila! Your article is available to read or download as a PDF or ePub.