Good, now the Nobel Committee should say it will only consider science published in open source journals for future Nobel prizes...
It's arguable that stuff isn't actually in the public record if access requires payments.
Its like if we paid taxes to build and maintain roads and bridges, only to have the constructor give the rights of the finished result to a toll-both company in order so they could evaluate and rate how good the individual construction workers are and make it easier to promote and hire them in the future. It make no sense for any practical profession to behave like this, and yet thats how academia has operated for ages. It is time that the public get what it paid for.
Elsevier will happily publish your papers as open access (for a small service fee).
Basically, over the years, they acquired a bunch of academic publishers that were effectively not-for-profit. And since, they've been raising prices. Harvesting market position.
Sure, that's not illegal. But it's arguably immoral.
> Unfortunately, funders don't want to restrict where researchers can publish the work (in order to prevent themselves from being able to silence results they might not like, i.e. hinder "academic freedom"). This means that this demand is implemented by simply paying hugely disproportionate publishing fees ("article processing charges") to the same old journals to make the individual articles they funded available as open access.
First, it's an absurd rationalization because all the finding agencies need to do is say "starting Jan 2019, all research papers funded by this fund must be open access; each violation results in $1k reduction in the grant", and any journals that don't yet have the option would provide a ~$1k open access publishing option.
Second, I don't believe the rationalization is what's really going on. I think there just aren't any/enough people at the funding agencies that care.
As for your second point: obviously there are many funding agencies, and surely people don't care at some. I was mostly referring to those who do want to promote the adoption of open access, such as the Gates Foundation or the Wellcome Trust (and many national funding bodies). They have absolutely come out making the above argument. They're really hesitant about this (although without a doubt also due to lobbying by the traditional publishers), which is laudable but also exacerbates the problem.
(Note also that they do have reason to be hesitant: science has seen a lot of pushback in the past, so these lessons have been hard-won and are ingrained in their DNA. Any movement that appears to go in the direction of the times when the catholic church could limit the adoption of scientific theories is met with heavy scepticism.)