It’s possible to get research articles for minimal costs via libraries. The price on the publishers website is an upper bound on what you need to pay. If you go to a public library and request an article you can get it for a few cents per page ‘service fee’ - you can order a copy mailed to your local library from a national copyright library. it’s pretty quick. You have to sign a form saying it’s not for commercial use - but if you’re making profit then it’s legitimate to pay a copyright fee to the publisher. Most authors put the accepted manuscript on their website minus the journal formatting, so if you find something on PubMed you can use the authors name and institution to find their website at university X and download the manuscript from the researchers homepage with one extra google search. The point of the announcement is to do with reviewing productivity of researchers - the news is that these funding bodies are going to introduce a legal fiction that only work published in open access journals ‘counts’ as research output going forward when it comes to allocating future funding. So a scientist who publishes in journals with a paywall will be deemed to have produced no output, and will be ranked lower than a colleague who publishes in open access titles. It’s a big deal.
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