Regardless of what IEEE or IBM are doing, in academia those who know what open access actually is support it, and those who don't have mostly been disregarding

Regardless of what IEEE or IBM are doing, in academia those who know what open access actually is support it, and those who don't have mostly been disregarding closed-access rules made by publishers. Tools like CiteSeerX can help you find archived copies of papers around the Internet, which may mean that you will not have to contend with paywalls at all to read the papers you want. For example, Tomasulo's famous paper about out-of-order execution originally published in the IBM J. Research has an entry here http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.129.4915 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.129.... and you can note that it is available on several academics' personal sites, presumably uploaded originally for pedagogical purposes. As well, CiteSeerX keeps a cache of quite a few citations locally.