The appearance of these samples, and the context of scientific reports, suggests to me that could well be Scotch Modern by Nick Shinn. The headline sample is perhaps be stretched for effect. There is also the less ambitious Scotch Roman MT from Adobe and Monotype Imaging.
Don

That’s Computer Modern, a typeface family frequently used in TeX typesetting. You can probably find versions that work with other software.

Actually, both font and the context in which it is used -- a "technical article" -- suggests this is the original Computer Modern, the default font for TeX created by Donald E. Knuth.

One of the tell-tale signs would be the proportions are ever so slightly different for different sizes. In its native habitat, CM fonts are scaled and spaced according to its intended output size. The image is not large enough to accurately measure it, but I'd eyeball that the large bold title is more flattened than the body copy.

These are not regular fonts; there are no exact counterparts in TTF or OTF format, because the scaling is done on the fly. Even OpenType features cannot do that (yet?). So best you can hope for is a precalculated font for 8pt, another for 10pt, and yet another for 12pt. (And so on.) If you do, beware the odd character mapping you will find in fast rip-offs. TeX has one of the weirdest native character maps ever. For example, it has no "space" glyph -- just because you don't ever need one inside TeX.

There are derived opentype fonts, Latin Modern

http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/latin-modern/download

The title seems to be the optical size for 7 points (lmroman7-regular.otf on my texlive installation, in the folder /usr/local/texlive/2013/texmf-dist/fonts/opentype/public/lm).

Thanks to both of you for the interesting technical info. I have not used LaTeX but I'll play around with the open source otfs.
Don

Just opened the otf download. An incredible 72 variations! Thanks for the pointer.
Don

Wow guys!
Thank you very much for such a quick response!