A lot of scholarship is freely accessible online, so it's not unfair to ask why we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for database access. Three general reasons:
- It seems like a lot of work is freely online, but in fact some studies estimate as low as 20% of recent peer reviewed papers on freely accessible online (see Marc-André Simard, Gita Ghiasi, Philippe Mongeon, Vincent Larivière. "National differences in dissemination and use of open access literature" Plos One, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0272730)
- Open databases like GoogleScholar are not specially designed for discipline-specific research & are not build for nuanced and detailed research inquiries
- Materials outside of academic databases don't have quality control, and GoogleScholar includes articles claiming to be peer reviewed that, in fact, are not.
