As a student I'm really pissed of each time I found an article which looks interesting and Springer tells me "pay me 35€ if you want to read this article that researchers have written and some others reviewed but only us get money because you know, we can."
New journals with open access initiative are really a good thing, but we also need to have access to old articles which are currently locked by multinationals which didn't do the work nor paid for it.
We don't need them anymore. They were useful when they were needed to have access in university and labs library to research from across the world. Now internet does that better than they could ever do it, and for a way less expensive price.
I'm willing to pay something like 30€/year to have unlimited access to all papers in a field. There could even be a limit to the number of authorized downloads (who can seriously read more than 100 papers per year anyway? (that's two per week, almost each week.)). But no DRM. And I say this but I really think that this should be in total open access for everyone, I'm just trying to moderate my words (and give them a less sudden death, I'm so kind!).
SpringerLink and co. need to change the way they distribute content. Or we'll have to kill them.
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