One partial solution: if the paper is academic research primarily funded by the government, it must be posted to the internet and available at no charge to the

One partial solution: if the paper is academic research primarily funded by the government, it must be posted to the internet and available at no charge to the public. The nih already does something like this. A variant would be to eliminate copyright on such works. That would take longer to do, but it would allow people to read the results of past work they indirectly paid for. There is no reason that companies like Elsevier, who do not pay for the research, should have exclusive rights to their results.