Karen Schneider points out the biggest benefit of a consortia that includes public and academic libraries -

Not only that, but as long as I continue living near a public library with Link+ access, when I graduate from University of San Francisco next year I won’t lose access to scholarly or hard-to-get materials.

This is a great way to maintain access to scholarly literature without requiring people to pay large fees to their alumni for access (which is often very limited) or over-burdening public libraries to provide scholarly materials.

One area that such consortia could also consider covering is databases. However, a recent debate on the lib-license list about alumni access had a post stating that it shouldn’t be provided as graduates would have little education use for scholarly information after they graduate (as opposed to commercial use). I found this to be a very odd claim, especially since over at ALIAnewgrad there is great enthusiasm for having access to databases after graduation for current awareness purposes, and to increase resources available to those who in turn want to write for scholarly journals. At Liblicense, Goodman wrote -

In general, such a move would further priviledge the alumni of the richer
schools, and further marginalize the information access for the alumni of
the lesser ones. Trying to add this access is a move away from the
principles of OA.

This I partially disagree with. If only a few have access to scholarly literature through databases, then only a few will have access to some of the resources needed to engage with the literature and write for scholarly journals. Adding alumni to the numbers of those who have access to such information is only a small measure, but it’s better than none. Even in LIS journals, take a look at the author affiliations - few are not working in libraries with generous resources. All librarians and technicians passed through university or TAFE at some stage, and having access to databases could increase the number and type of people writing for and engaging with the literature.

And while I am very enthusiastic about Open Access, we are not far enough along to rely solely on materials available via OA licenses. There will always be commercial databases, and there will always be writers choosing to write for non-OA publications.