[franga2000]

Those aren't free in most libraries I've been to and don't apply to everything (don't quote me on this, but since journals are basically subscription services, their articles aren't actually owned by the library and they might not be able to loan them out further).

[meej]

Interesting. I've never been a patron of a public library in the United States that charged patrons fees for ILL, and neither of the universities I've attended charged for it, either.

My own academic library where I work used to have a per-semester limit and charged for requests over it but we eliminated it for a number of reasons, one of which was that it was skewing our acquisition decisions. When we did charge, the cost was less than what you'd pay at a publisher's website.

It is true that some vendor content doesn't allow ILL, but it's in the minority. In 2009 the Information Delivery Services Project found around 15% of publishers do not permit ILL at all while 46% permit it with no restrictions. The rest are in-between, applying restrictions like no lending outside of the US or to commercial entities. https://idsproject.org/documents/IDS%20Project%20licensing.p...

[franga2000]

Here it's around 8€ per unit for national ILL and 17-38€ for international (depends on the system it goes through and may be even higher in special cases). You can also get copies of articles for a bit less, but that's not always available.

None of that is unreasonably expensive, but I can see it adding up quickly if you need to order like half of the things in your references (which might happen if your institution isn't subscribed to one of the bigger journals in your field).