> The scandal in my opinion is that a professor or phd candidate is paid by the state to do research and then the state has to pay again to license the contributions their employees made. Meanwhile the taxpayer who already paid for the research cannot access that research for free.

Ignoring the fact that you can indeed get the research for free if you e-mail the researchers... Who is going to pay for unlimited online access?

Somebody has to pay for it. It is not free to publish journals, or keep tens of thousands of them, with millions of articles, around indefinitely, for instant access by anyone on the web.

The only thing you can change is who is paying whom. Either you pay a publisher so that they maintain access. Or the people actually publishing an article pays the publisher (Open Access), in which case it's taxpayer money from the researchers' budget paying for it. Or you have lawmakers create some government subsidy for them to maintain access, or you have lawmakers create some government agency to maintain access. Other ways to pay include big private donors, universities, libraries, museums, endowments, foundations, societies, etc.

In all of those cases, someone will be paying. The question is, who, and how much? So far, nobody has offered to cough up all the dough. Maybe you can get Bezos, Bill and Buffet to chip in.