I have noticed the unfortunate trend of locking up the peer-reviewed studies behind toll gates. Many of these gates are very expensive, since they're geared toward organizations that can pay - universities, large firms. I no longer have access to the glorious breadth nad depth of biomed and chem info, real peer-reviewed stuff, that I once did.
A peculiar effect of this is that the younger generations see only the blogs and opinion pieces and the multiply-recycled spin on the open 'Net as "all there is". I might argue that opening all those pay gates would have a short-term deleterious effect while the maintaining organizations find other ways to meet their expenses ... and a longer-term salutary effect because then actual facts will be out there. Jmo. cn
I also noticed that. Whats the cause of that? Is this primarily a $$ thing for need of funding, a privlege censorship issue, or is it an abuse of intellectual protection ?