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If you enjoy a paper you read, email the first or corresponding author and say so! It would make my day if this happened to me, a PhD student.

Giving back doesn't have to be monetary. A note like that could give someone the encouragement they need to finish an experiment or a draft.

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This.

Paying taxes is (at least in western countries where i know a tiny bit about academia) sufficient to support the authors.

If you want to go beyond that: reach out / blog / tweet / etc about papers that peek your interest. If someone else wrote about a paper of mine, I'd be over the moon!

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