Dorothea Salo at Caveat Lector does a nice job succinctly dissecting a primary cause of the serials crisis (and many other crises besides) in The Machine Behind the Curtain.

Why? Because faculty don’t feel the pinch. When they want e-access to an article, it’s usually there, and if it isn’t, they can comfortably attribute its absence to those darn libraries, when are they going to digitize everything already? (Never mind that we mostly aren’t in the article-digitization business. Faculty don’t know that.) Faculty don’t see the firewalls. They don’t realize how easy it is for a database provider to yank access. And all this wonderful e-access has happened with zero additional effort or expense from faculty; journals, database providers, and libraries have Just Done It. So why should faculty bother investigating the supply-chain?

Oh why, oh why is the scholarly publishing market so very broken? And must it always remain so? It’s possible that if publishers really do make the lives of faculty miserable enough, then those same faculty will well and truly wake up this time. But our hopes have been dashed before… (sniffle)