Introducing The Paper Bay
With the exception of old and obscure papers (i.e., 15 years or more and not cited in the last 5 years), I don't really see what the big problem is. I have yet to mail an author and <i>not</i> receive a pdf of the paper, usually within days, sometimes within minutes. When you have a reference and Google, you're seconds away from finding that author's current affiliation & email address. I once emailed the author of a book that retailed for 150$+ on some Elsevier subsidiary to ask for a few pages. Turns out the book was basically her PhD thesis (many, many books are like that) and she send me the pdf of that thesis a few hours after I emailed her. All this brouhaha over access to papers is a storm in a glass water if you ask me, instigated mostly by those who don't even need the papers but rather are looking for a big meany to pick an ideological fight with. Maybe it differs per field, I don't know.