Paywalls are bad, and fortunately many of us are working towards open access for our research.

However, almost every paper I ever look for (published since 2000, say) is available for free on the web, usually on the author's web site. Searching google scholar will find just about everything. So I disagree that "research done in academia is closed to working programmers". If that was the case, then something like Papers We Love would never have even started.

[Full disclosure: I co-authored the original blog post with Jean.]