The main obstacle to access is the subscription fee journals require. They are very expensive, even for libraries, and their price only increases.  This makes the feasibility of purchase for individual students (most of whom have incurred prior debt) impossible, and for libraries, very hard. This has to do with hard financial times for students and institutions.

Summaries of important work could be paraphrased on Wikipedia, allowing students to get the gist of the research, without access to the source material. This requires those with access to reference that which they have read onto Wikipedia on a regular basis.