The research is already funded differently, usually through (public) grants, salaries of the researchers and everybody on their teams (taxes, tuition), or even

The research is already funded differently, usually through (public) grants, salaries of the researchers and everybody on their teams (taxes, tuition), or even patent revenues. Nobody makes money off of publications except for the publishers. Some publishers even demand money from the authors for their publishing "services". The publishers themselves add very little value, as e.g. peer reviews are done for "free" (aka on the universities or peer-reviewers dime), or rather for the prestige that comes from being a reviewer. What's more, a lot of the authors of what's published actually want to publish their work for everybody else to see. But they are currently caught between a rock and a hard place: they need the "reputation" that comes from publishing in "prestigious" journals but those journals or rather the parent publishing companies require signing a contract saying that the article may not be published elsewhere, not even on the authors personal website. In short, the actual research work has been paid for already, academics (authors and peer reviewers) are fucked, the public (who often paid for the research already) is fucked, and the publishers are money-printing-machines. You could easily replace the publishers with a few non-profit orgs that are funded by universities for a couple of hundred bucks per university per month, and make all the content available for "free" to everybody on the planet in perpetuity. There are over 25,000 universities worldwide, so if every university paid e.g. 200 bucks a month, it would come out as $5M per month, which is enough to fund the publishing end of every last scientific journal in existence and then some (assuming we keep not paying authors and peer reviewers through such publishing, like it is now) If I was the regulator in charge, the first thing I would do is require all work that is - in part - paid for by public taxpayer funds or public university funds to be published under a free license, since the public already paid for the work. Similar to e.g. works created by US government - and some other governments - is automatically in the public domain already; that's why e.g. all those nice NASA pictures are "freely" available to everybody already, because the US federal tax payers already paid about $35 bucks on average per year to fund ALL of NASA.