> Publishers charge between $14 and $40 per article when > you get an ala carte pdf from their journals,
I just wonder... does anyone pay that? I'm under the impression that the only customers that such publishers have are universities and (their) libraries that offer free online access to everyone sitting behind their proxy servers.
It's more common in the business world than the academic world-- business libraries typically have fewer staff members and more money, so purchasing single articles makes sense, wheras academic libraries have more staff and pay less for subscriptions to journals. Single-article purchases probably do not happen terribly often with paleontology literature though, as most corporations doing the purchasing are likely concerned with business or trade literature.
Heather Y.