What would the cost of your last term paper be without library access?

In honour of Open Access Week 2014, I asked the question, “What would the cost of your last term paper be without library access?”. I strategically chose to parse the Works Cited section for a paper I wrote in December 2013 that addressed the open access movement and the political economy of scholarly communication. My assumption was that for a paper on this topic, many of the cited works would be available open access.

As you will see this was not the case. I have reproduced below the Works Cited section for this paper. Entries are either marked as OA (open access) or are annotated with an associated cost calculated in October 2014. Some quick statistics are available on the final page, but in summary, it would have cost me $488.96 USD in October 2014 to write this paper if I did not benefit from library access at York University.