Now we aren't the gatekeepers anymore. Students decide on their own, and many are ill-prepared to do that. For one thing, it indicates that they're taking advantage of online services to find articles and studies that also appear in physical form but might not be found in the library stacks because someone else has them or the library doesn't carry them. Online material in certain fields is often more current than what's in the stacks, students say, and Web research is a smarter use of their time. The Web is fine if they're analyzing websites themselves as artifacts of culture, but what is published on the Web is more of a problem.
Vanity publications can and do appear.
Other faculty aren't as concerned, asking only that students use websites from academic journals, government agencies, and science foundations. Sources published on paper, after all, can't always be trusted either. If a report is from the National Academy of Sciences, that's what it is, whether on paper or on the Web. More and more, primary materials in my field first appear on the Web. Arms, who serves on publications boards in physics and computer science, thinks the trend toward online materials will keep growing and that faculty should get used to it.