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Introduction
As more and more articles become freely available on the web so do the publishers' constraints on access become more obvious. For this particular review I noted what was freely available - roughly 50 per cent of the 120 journal titles scanned and the large majority of articles and reports referenced - as can be seen from the bibliography below. However a number of articles were hidden behind paywalls and two articles in particular that I would have liked to review were not accessible to me without paying an enormous PPV fee. They were:
"The growing crisis: scholarly publishing pressures facing health sciences libraries", by Karen Butter et al. Published in The Journal of Library Administration, Vol. 52 No. 8. A bit ironic being behind a paywall as the abstract indicates that it is about promoting open access! The paywall can only be breached by paying £23.50 (US $36) for access to the article.
"A dual approach to assessing collection development and acquisitions for academic libraries" by Robert Danielson. Library Collections, Acquisitions, and Technical Services, Vol. 36, Issues 3-4, 2012, pp. 84-96. This article uses ILL statistics as a tool but costs US$31.50 to purchase.
Why you may ask is the price so absurdly high for a process that has very low marginal cost? It is a consequence of the monopolistic pricing of subscriptions which are so high that setting a reasonable price for individual article access would destroy the goose that lays the golden eggs. Of course a number of other articles I reference will not be accessible to many readers.
Document supply
The long awaited launch in the UK of FAB - Find a Book in Libraries - will have taken place by the time you read this review. As the author writes, "It is finally here - a single point of access on the internet to all UK public library services." It is indeed an important step forward but the elephant in the room is ignored. Obtaining a book outside of your local authority will still mean a slow and expensive ILL request. Public library ILL in the UK is tiny compared to, for example, the US where the service is often free to the citizen, Denmark where it is free...