As a former System's Librarian YES! This is such a racket. You sell new Journals to libraries and you made your living just doing that. Some of the Journals are

As a former System's Librarian YES! This is such a racket. You sell new Journals to libraries and you made your living just doing that. Some of the Journals are hundreds of dollars to have in print. Libraries then put the old journals in behind the new one for about 18 or so copies. The older ones get stored in boxes and collect dust. Occasionally (10 out of a thousand students will come in and ask for help to find a journal. That was all. As Journals came online they solved the storage and accessibility problems for the library. $30,000 a year to save your library team all the work and increase accessibility is AWESOME sales pitch. Within 3 years our $30,000 bill became $90,000 and today my old library has 3 less librarians due to the cost of digital access (Or so I am told). Digital Access = free money that they never got till now. Also many Journals are not included in the digital access for 12 to 18 months so that their print business stayed at the same level and so did the storage for libraries. To think of all that and the fact that most of the Journals's research has direct use of tax payer funds but not give tax payer access is crazy. Also knowledge is power and all our top knowledge is behind closed doors. Drove me nuts.