[Permit]

They have operating costs. They're a non-profit but they pay people to digitize the works. It costs a lot of money to access some of these things. It's not prohibitively expensive to access these documents. You can read three articles free every two weeks if you're exceedingly down on your luck.

[nullc]

You couldn't a week ago. This isn't some accident. Their openness comes hard won with threats of their reputation.

Their digitization is largely done by a for-profit company. It's not competitively bid. There are many parties who would digitize these works at no cost— archive.org and google for example, and could afford to do it without pay walling the results.

[Permit]

>Their digitization is largely done by a for-profit company.

I was unaware of this. What company does the digitization for them?

[ig1]

Then why don't they do so ?

Anyone at all (including you) is free to scan journals that are in the public domain and publish them online for free. If you scan/ocr them then there are many places (including Project Gutenberg and archive.org) who will host them for you.