"I understand perfectly that faculty want their first-year students to find quality resources and they want their students to have an understanding of scholarly communication. But is the best way to do that forcing them to find scholarly articles for a research paper? That requires so many different skills that many of these students don’t have yet:"
Digital content, unlike print materials, is sold to libraries under a range of licensing terms. (...) The Digital Content & Libraries Working Group (DCWG) began documenting and describing attributes of various licensing arrangements libraries may have with publishers in the August 2012 report Ebook Business Models for Public Libraries. Now we are pleased to share The Ebook Business Model Scorecard, which more fully examines the variables often seen in ebook license agreements or contracts.
"Also be sure to get your ebooks and literature not only without DRM, but also in a free format, preferably EPUB. While PDF is also free, it is less ideal for ebook viewing, reflowing, and editing. The sites listed provide files unencumbered, but it's important to be mindful that both of these can still contain DRM elsewhere."
G. Knorz, and R. Kuhlen (Eds.) volume 38 of Schriften zur Informationswissenschaft, Hochschulverband für Informationswissenschaft, (2000)3-87940-753-3.