Cost is a big part of the problem. The cost of publishing papers online is very small. Sci-Hub is the proof of that. Yet access to many papers costs about US$3

Cost is a big part of the problem. The cost of publishing papers online is very small. Sci-Hub is the proof of that. Yet access to many papers costs about US$35 per paper. Many researchers (including students) can't afford that. Nor can the general public. I understand that none of that income goes to the authors - they don't benefit from their own work. That was the whole idea behind copyright. The publishing house set-up is a dinosaur.