Sure, there are other ways. Arxiv is certainly an option. However, someone still needs to develop and organize this (and pay for that). There is no free lunch

Sure, there are other ways. Arxiv is certainly an option. However, someone still needs to develop and organize this (and pay for that). There is no free lunch - either you are paying a publisher for this service, or a university library to do the same. (Of course, one might argue that other entities might be able to do the same thing cheaper - but this was not the topic of my argument) (Actually, there already is some sort of "inter-university p2p network": http://www.lockss.org/ http://www.lockss.org/ )