If one considers education as lifelong learning 1, then journal literature must be acknowledged as learning content with great value for self-learners.
Many parents of children with uncured diseases have an unquenchable thirst for information about the condition - particularly for rare diseases which receive little coverage in the mainstream press. Journal articles which report original research are of incredible value to help parents understand their child's condition. Unfortunately, many of these parents express frustration with obtaining access to relevant literature. (Many organizations which represent these parents are members of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access 2 for this very reason.)
Less dramatically, newspapers report daily on the latest findings of scientists and health research. Usually, the coverage reports findings originally published in a peer-reviewed journal. But the curious reader who desires to read the original paper himself is frequently stymied, not having a subscription to the journal. (For a light-hearted example to the contrary, see this recent article 3 from the Daytona Beach News-Journal, which points readers to an article deposited in the arXiv 4.)
Going a step further, consider that prized tool of self-learners, Wikipedia 5 . Imagine if each Wikipedia article on a scientific subject was fully referenced (a goal 6 of the project). Imagine further that each citation linked to a freely-available copy of a relevant journal article. Those links would prove tremendously valuable to the self-learner who aspires to deepen his understanding of the topic.
Beyond access barriers, removing permission barriers opens even more possibilities: translation 7 , summary 8, annotation and commentary 9, to name a few.
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