It is entirely within the technological ability of 21st century humanity to create a single database, paired with an excellent search engine, that includes the full text of every single academic paper that has ever been published, and to make this database freely available to every person in the world. If the cost were shared amongst academic institutions worldwide, the expense would be trivial.
Doing this would constitute the greatest advance in the dissemination of human knowledge since the Gutenberg press. The only reason why we can’t do it is because a bunch of hugely profitable rent-extracting parasites are squatting on top of an unearned mountain of copyrights.
