I think it might be in part due to the frustration caused by now ubiquitous availability of articles, but large barriers to actually access those articles. Google lets you see tons of articles online as search results, but even institutional access generally will not allow you to see everything out there due to subscription budget constraints. I'm sure even a place like Harvard doesn't subscribe to every issue of every online journal.
> Google lets you see tons of articles online as search results
Can anyone here who works for Google tell us if all of these results are actually loadable from the Google campus? This seems likely, given how they are indexable by the search engine but are blocked to anyone else save paid subscribers.
Google could easily put a stop to this abuse by declaring that it will publicly cache anything it finds to be loadable only from its own IP range.
At Pitt I can go to the library's website and request journals they don't have access to, I get an email the next day with a .pdf of the journal article requested.
You can automate the VPN'ing. Or, in my case, I just use an on-campus computer which doesn't need to VPN. What you can't automate away into instantaneousness is the delay of waiting a day for a paper to get there.
The point is that even with institutional access (including interlibrary loan, shared databases, etc.), a lot of electronic information, which is readily deliverable, is not readily accessible.
On top of that, many people do not have institutional access, and are thus cut off from research results funded primarily or solely by their tax dollars. Or another way to look at it is that many "prestigious" journals will claim exclusive copyright, giving researchers the unfortunate choice between prestige and open access.
I'm still learning about this, as some people I know are pushing in the open research / open access direction.
