Well, let this be the first case you've heard of this. I just graduated, but while I was a student at the University of Sydney, I found that many journals (incl

Well, let this be the first case you've heard of this. I just graduated, but while I was a student at the University of Sydney, I found that many journals (including ACM and IEEE, and even ISO) were not accessible through our university's library system. I usually just decided to not bother citing those papers and citing others. It just so happens that the field I was working in (astrophysics) is one where many papers are published on arXiv, but my supervisor always got frustrated when I used the arXiv copy of a paper (sometimes the final edit of a paper isn't uploaded to arXiv so you might be citing something which was removed after the journal review). And for papers not on arXiv, you can sometimes manage to the paper on the author's website but that's hardly a workable system (and those are usually preprints and not the final draft). And yes, you can get papers by emailing the author if you really need a copy but that limits your ability to search through many papers as broad background reading (it seems a waste of time for M researchers to ask N authors for a copy of a paper, only to read the abstract and results). Academic papers (which are publicly funded through grants and often produced by public institutions) should be free to the public. Those papers have already been paid for by the public. EDIT: ISO not being available was legitimately a real blow -- I was working on a personal project that required reading the DataMatrix standard and I couldn't get access to it. Instead I had to try to piece together the protocol from the Wikipedia description and just gave up because I couldn't get it working.