[mnl]

Those were the days, but going back to photocopy world won't be very good for productivity and maybe the quality of research. Being able to check everything easily is an incredible advantage. And then there's this problem of disappearing or lost issues that some might remember fondly. Quite frankly, if it comes to this everybody will get pirated copies or ask a colleague for theirs. I love paper though, a few things exist solely on it (and maybe they are in another country, how much better digital copies are cannot be overstated).

[aurelwu]

I don't doubt people will get pirated copies instead of using the paper versions, but the existence of the paper versions allows them to pretend they read the paper in a legit way. I'm not taking sides for that sort of behaviour or against it, just that I expect that will be the workflow.

[betterunix2]

Nobody has to pretend to have read articles in a legitimate way; a researcher only has to be able to give a legitimate citation for the article. Citations should be sufficient for other researchers to find the article in question and BibTeX data is easy to find for most published work. I frequently google the title, authors, and sometimes year (if there are multiple versions from different years) and download a PDF from wherever (rarely the official publisher, because logging in is too difficult), and then just find BibTeX data as needed when I am writing a paper.