What I don't get is...why don't governments simply declare that all research at publicly funded universities must be made available to the public. It's seems so trivial. You pay the researchers, you get the research results, you make it available for all citizens (or the world). Companies do this, they keep the research results of their employees.
A major reason, unfortunately, is that they don't want to be interfering with the distribution of scientific articles. For example, if there's a very well-read journal in a specific discipline, but whose contents are only visible with a subscription, then if one countries prevents its researchers from publishing in those journals, research by that country's researchers will be less read. And the reason they do not wa…
To me, the problem is that scientists are highly motivated to achieve successes in publishing and prestige and impact, and they are less likely to stand in front of governments and demand open-access and freely circulated articles. This is not in their best interest, I would argue, however they are EXTREMELY busy people, researchers work 60-70 hours with a multitude of different duties. It's not at all surprising they don't have the time to lobby congress vociferously on behalf of the commons.