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by 13415 1867 days ago
They charge shitloads of money to universities for accessing their journals, these fees are so high that e.g. our university is very picky about which "packet" they buy and limit them to institutions on a case-by-case basis.

The copies on the author's pages and in open repositories are obliged to be pre-publication drafts, so you cannot cite them.

In fact, under control of large publishers journals have become fairly inventive about making pre-publication manuscripts unusable. For instance, I recently published in a prestigious journal that had an online editing system so that all final revisions stayed in the system - no author copy of any kind, every proof marked with author name and large watermarks -, and they made lots of small, sometimes unnecessary changes in the very last editing step. They also don't paginate the final versions that are published online first, so you can only know the real final pagination a year or so after the first version has been published online.