I always see a lot of "it worked for NIH" .. or "it worked for NLM"... or "like PubMed".... or "like PubMed Central"... Gosh, the biomed people have great information structure, some great corpora to use for text mining research, a mandate to make the journal articles that result from federally-funded research available, a great digital library with lots of useful articles... should be an obvious thing to extend that to the other federal agencies that fund research.  Why isn't it?

I think in the case of mandates, it's absolutely crucial to consider the impact of the patient groups and non-profit organizations that provide support to patient groups.  They are a force to be reckoned with in opposition to the publishers. Society publishers and for-profit publishers both spend a great deal of money actively working to fight government open access mandates. It's the patient groups with the stories of how access or lack of access killed a child, a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, etc., that turned the tide. Remember, too, that the NIH mandate had a pretty shaky start.

There's just no equivalent in the physical sciences and engineering.

Also, in biomedicine you have more than 50 years of money going into information retrieval research to make PubMed what it is. People may complain about some aspect of the interface, but there's really a lot to it to make it work like it does.

Lookit, NASA, DOD, DOE, all have large technical report collections on the web that are freely available to the public. They are, for the most part, a bitch to search and rather unsatisfying in the results. Any one of these organizations could have done better years ago with the money they've spent. (FFS DTIC just got worse).They could have taken journal articles written by government employees and put them in their digital libraries - but they haven't. They just put the metadata in.

ERIC, the Department of Education research database has had such up and down funding- I don't even know where it stands - but it was a really useful resource. EPA is just a mess. Transportation had a decent database with reports... Justice has a few different things... but without steady funding over years and some lobbyists to fight the publisher's lobby... well, I don't think the future is that bright.

Elsewhere around the web there has been a lot of discussion of the Research Works Act (see John Dupuis' round-up, for example).  This is a bill to prevent U.S. federal agencies from mandating open access to government funded works, among other things. One of the arguments given by the publishers is that access to the literature is not a problem - everyone who needs it has several ways to get it.*  They cite these methods:

• abstracts are free
• institutional subscriptions
• walk-up access for members of the community of institutional subscribers
• pay-per-view
• article rental
• patient programs
• programs to provide access to less developed countries
• interlibrary loan (henceforth, ILL)

Abstracts, yeah, well, that's fine but...

Institutional subscriptions are for affiliates of the institution. By that I mean employees, staff, students, faculty, etc. Budgets are being cut all over the country, in some places as much as 25-30%. Even very wealthy institutions can't license everything that their users need.

Walk up access. Most of our licenses do permit walk up access. If you do live near a large research institution then this might help you. It is not acceptable, however, for government labs, for-profit companies, and other organizations that should have their own licenses to systematically send interns over to the large university to download all the needed articles.(as was mentioned in the comments to Sandra Porter's post)

Pay per view. Typically articles can be purchased for $15-$75. Sometimes that's for 24 hours worth of access, sometimes that's to download. That's never to redistribute.

Article rental. This is to look at the article online only - not to print or save down - for approximately 24 hours. This typically costs <$5. The problem is engaging fully with an article in 24 hours. What if you want to cite later and check something?

Patient programs and programs for less developed countries. I personally think these are great programs but 1) I'm not sure how many patients know about their programs and 2) there are a lot of people in developed countries who still don't have access.  Of course 1) doesn't mean that the publishers aren't trying.

ILL. Here is where we get to the purpose of my post. Can interlibrary loan solve our problems? My answer is no, and I'll tell you why.

First, you have to be affiliated with a library to request an interlibrary loan. Most people in western countries have a local public library. My local public library won't ILL articles for you and any books they ILL have to be free. Government libraries (at least the one I worked at) could also only get free articles. Did you know that many universities charge a fee to lend articles? Government libraries don't charge, but what with their budget woes there were a lot of articles to which they don't have access.

Second, ILL is not to be a substitute for a subscription. There are a set of guidelines that libraries follow. One of these is CONTU. The rule of 5 states that you can request no more than 5 articles per year from a particular journal (for journals published within the last 5 years).**  So what if there's a special issue? What if it's a really relevant journal with lots of good stuff? What you do is you go and you purchase the copyright clearances for extra copies --- or you say no. You could also pay the document delivery price (pay per view).

Third, ILL is expensive. A 1993 report calculated about $30 per transaction. If you have to pay for document delivery or copyright clearance charges or if you can only get it from some university that charges a fee, then it can be a whole lot more. Libraries are cutting services and even when they have a robust service, there's only so much an individual researcher can ask for without being seen as abusing the system.

Fourth, ILL is slow. It really is. Think of the opportunity cost. The luxury of being affiliated with two major research institutions means I have almost everything I want at my fingertips - but do people satisfice if they have to wait 2 days-3 weeks for something? Sure they do. And sometimes they wait for a crappy copy because the publisher says you have to print it first and then send fax quality (Evil empire rule).

Fifth, a crappy copy days later is not the type of engagement we need right now. We need to be able to mine, to compare, to calculate, to reuse data and tables

So no, IMO, ILL will not solve our problems.  I would be interested to hear of any other public libraries (besides perhaps NY city and maybe Cleveland) that do ILL articles for their patrons - for no fee, happily, and a bunch all the time.

With all this said, I really do wonder to whom the publishers are talking when they're hearing that people have the access they need. Are they talking to people who are at institutions like mine***? Are they talking to community college instructors? Are they talking to random members of the public?

* this argument does not address the bunch of other arguments including the one about how the taxpayer has already paid for the research and the writing up and the peer review...

** actually i think this really applies to the lender so you could probably shop around to multiple lenders to request things but it's easy to run out of lenders for expensive or rare titles

*** and hey some of our researchers are pissed because we had to drop AMS (American meteorological society) journals and a  v. v. expensive T&F remote sensing journal

update 1/12/12: Kiyomi Deards adds on twitter that some publishers limit or won't sell copyright clearance to go over 5.