Public libraries are amazingly accessible, but university libraries remain complicit in the ongoing racket of pay-to-read academic literature. Although many university libraries allow guest access during the day, you cannot access their academic subscriptions unless you're on the secure wifi.
They have to be, as a condition of their journal subscriptions. Librarians generally want to extend access as far as possible, but they are terrified of pissing off a publisher and getting a journal taken away from their entire university's community of researchers who need it to do their work.
If the universities really cared about open access, they could unionize against the publishers. Imagine the top 20 schools, which also happen to be the ones producing the research, refused to abide by the publisher rules. Would they all have their access revoked?
It's never made sense to me why, despite billions of dollars budgeted toward scientific funding, private companies make money charging for journal access. Why can't all that public funding also go toward funding the peer review, editing, and publishing?
> If the universities really cared about open access, they could unionize against the publishers.
If universities really, really cared, they could band together and set up their own journal publishing organization (many universities do have their own academic publishing arms, but a single-university journal publisher probably would be harder to establish respect for than one sponsored by a broad coalition of major universities.)
It's not enough to set up new journals. Until you convince everyone who matters (in your area of research) to use only the new journals, you still need the subscriptions to all the old journals as well, until (if!) they are abandoned and lose all status.
"There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought
valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure
their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But
even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future.
Everything up until now will have been lost."
"really cared about open access" doesn't mean caring about it above everything else, especially above their primary mission of doing research, which requires ability to publish in every particular research niche community globally (for every research area, the "top 20 schools" are different 20 schools, with only minor overlap), and the ability to read all this communication. Boycotts have been discussed and haven't succeeded because they directly harm researcher short-term interests; a slow migration is in process with some research communities switching to e.g. arxiv or other open access resources, but until all or most research areas worldwide have done so, every university still needs these subscriptions. Open access is desired, but having the subscriptions (and taking part of the publications) is mandatory.
Yes, I imagine they would. They would also probably be taken to court for breach of contract, and the courts would fine them a substantial amount. I would certainly hope that this would be the case - even the top 20 universities have to obey the law, and producing research has never been a valid excuse for choosing to ignore a law you don't like.
Criminal activity is not the answer here - nor should it ever be.
What the universities can do, if they cared, is re-negotiate their contracts with the publishing houses. Of course, this requires assigning a monetary value to the amount they care, which must be greater that the inevitable price increase they woulld incur for the change in access restrictions.
This doesn't have to be the case: the libraries of public German universities are often called "University and State Library" and are open to anyone living in the state.
There are plenty of public-access university libraries. What they're restricted from doing is extending journal access to users who are neither attached to the university or physically present in the library.
