So I guess I have a bad case of the Tuesdays along with the Mondays I got yesterday. Oh well so be it.

The thing that has got me all in a snit are these damn publishers who publish articles waaay in advance before the print. This is particularly problematic as patrons search PubMed.
For example look at this citation I just grabbed from PubMed:
Antel J, Owens T. Multiple sclerosis and immune regulatory cells. Brain. 2004 Sep;127(Pt 9):1915-6. No abstract available. PMID: 15321939

Do you see a problem with getting this article today (August 24, 2004)? Well the fact that the article is published in September of 2004 makes it pretty freaking hard to get in August of 2004!!! Our patrons will actually call us up and complain about the fact that they can't get access to the article. Now this would be easily dismissible if it weren't for the fact that the publisher puts this article up on their site. So our user thinks that anything that is displayed on the site is ripe for the picking. Now I have to go into a long song and dance explanation about how we get this journal through our OhioLINK consortia and while the journal is technically up to date on the consortia's web site, we do not have access to articles published ahead time.
I realize OhioLINK is a little unique with our electronic journal collection that we have. But this problem occurs with major vendors of multiple online journals, such as Ovid. (I am not picking on Ovid.) If you have access Brain through Ovid, you still are out of luck, because Ovid has not yet received the online version of the article either.

So despite the article appearing on the publisher's site, implying that it is "out there" and published, libraries who subscribe to that journal by other means are out of luck until it is September and publisher has submitted the article to the full text vendors.
Good business sense you say. The publisher wants you to pay for access to their site for privileged access. I agree with you in theory. But how is a library to keep up with these publishers? We can't monitor every publisher (large and small) to manage access to all of their sites. That is why we have full text vendors.

Ok I guess the conclusion I have come to regarding this example is that unfortunately libraries must sacrifice one for the other. In other words if you want ahead of time access you need to have the staff, patience, and organization skills to maintain access to the publishers' web sites. If you want to try and get the most bang for your buck, time, and sanity then you go with a full text vendor to provide your full text access, thus sacrificing some access to those journals that throw their content up months in advance. We here at our library try to do a little bit of both. We have access through some full text vendors (such as Ovid and Ebsco databases and OhioLINK's EJC) and we subscribe to some publisher's sites directly. So, I guess that mean I go only partially insane with electronic journals.