The situation may differ greatly among fields?  For CS, ACM digital library is $99&#x2F;yr which is pretty reasonable (I&#x27;ve been paying it for years and willing to chip in that range even ACM allows the author to put up the submitted version on his&#x2F;her own site for free).  I do occasionally hit paywalls of other publishes, and wish they make non-member per-article fee cheaper---like $5 or $10 instead of $35; they might set the per-article price that high to encourage institutions to sign up the package?<p>I&#x27;m not a researcher though, so my pursuit of papers are mostly purely interest-driven and can be given up easily.  If you need to survey large number of papers I&#x27;d imagine the fee quickly accumulates.