The process of buying research articles could greatly use some centralization, period. Right now it's a muck of confusing, widely different websites with compl

The process of buying research articles could greatly use some centralization, period. Right now it's a muck of confusing, widely different websites with completely different rules and interfaces for finding and downloading papers. If you have the "benefit" of institution-wide access to get free papers, you are then forced to access everything through your institution's proxy, which layers on more kludge and slowness. Pubmed and later Google Scholar provided the first great leap in allowing article citations to be found quickly from a centralized database. But generally you had to grab this citation and then trudge through the journal's article search interface via your institution's proxy to then retrieve the actual paper. Being able to click Buy Now, or Access Now, and get the actual paper via a flexible authentication system that works across institutions, would be the next revolution. I don't see any indicator that journals are moving to build this, though, so we are indefinitely stuck with an endless patchwork of incompatible e-commerce sites and institutional proxies. The result is that a bucketload of undergrads are still stuck collecting PDF's via the gateways as their daily drudgework, allowing primary investigators in universities around the country to put off finding actual labwork for the undergrads to do ;-)