Last week, Pierre Lindenbaum made the bold move of creating a bookmarklet that would find the author's email in the HTML version of a paper and automatically create an email asking for an offprint (authors are generally happy to send copies of their own papers - at least they don't have to pay the postage any more).
This form will generate a personalised bookmarklet for your own use:
Sample message:
Hello, my name is Bruce Banner, I'm a nuclear physicist working on gamma radiation at Los Alamos.
Your recent paper titled "A method for finding communities of related genes -- Wilkinson and Huberman 101 (Supplement 1): 5241 -- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" caught my attention today. Would it be possible for you to send a PDF copy of the paper?
Best regards,
Bruce Banner, PhD.
Gamma Radiation Laboratory, Los Alamos
P.S. If you've already deposited this paper in an open access repository I could get it from there, if you have the address.