If you’re interested in physics or math (or a few other subjects) and want to read the actual papers then you can easily do so. In my field (cosmology) there is no need to subscribe to expensive journals to read papers. We just go to the eprint (electronically printed) server arxiv.org where you can look up any paper you want without paying. It is free and legal. arXiv is run by Cornell University and has papers from the past 20 years on there.
Now while this great and free tool has many good papers, one should be careful. I think there is only a basic vetting process (which leads to whack-job papers being put in the general physics section from what I have seen) there is no peer review. Now no matter your thoughts on how peer review is currently being run, it is still a crucial process to ensure that what is being published is logical, is new, and it is significant enough to warrant it being published.
With that warning in mind, you can do things to protect yourself from the crazy and bad. A lot of it involves clicking to the right hand side and looking at some of the more technical details of the paper by going to inspirehep.net by clicking on the link to the paper’s inspire listing. This shows things like the authors publishing information, whether the paper has been published, and various other useful information you can use to help determine if the work is worth your time. It may take you quite a bit of time in the beginning to figure out what is good or not (normally unpublished work, especially if it is more than a few years old should be avoided), with some time you should be able to quickly tell if a paper is good. You might even recognize some authors that are associated with good work so that when you see there name on a paper you can generally trust the work to be good.
So with this new information you should go out there and get reading!
