On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 22:03, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
I don't know much about the situation in the humanities though.
There's a nice little undercurrent of paper exchange - some legitimate (asking the author for copies, getting PDFs from author websites, getting stuff from university pre-print draft repositories), some not so legitimate (*cough*BitTorrent*cough*) - much as there is in science, dampened only by the fact that less work in the humanities is done in journal papers and more in books.
Sadly, compared to science, the embrace of the alternative (open access, Creative Commons etc.) is very slow. Although the argument for public access and against oligopoly publishers that is used for open access science also applies in the humanities, in science it is strengthened by the desire for open access data that the published study draw on be also be made available online, while in, say, philosophy, Plato and Kant are already meet the 'open access' standard. ;-)
A lot of the slightly older stuff is in JSTOR, which isn't open access, but the access requirements demanded of subscribing institutions go in the 'fairly expensive' category rather than the 'brutally fisted with stinging nettles by Satan himself' category.