Most 'solutions' to this problem involve an open access revolution where researchers put their publications online on the arXiv or similar.
This is entirely possible but it doesn't address the need for journal subscriptions to access pre-existing articles. As I understand it, unless copyright law changes, if a researcher wants to read online a 1970s paper from Nature, their library has to subscribe to Nature forever (approximately), even if everything they produce from today onwards will be uploaded to github.
It seems the only time I'm ever on Springer or Wiley is to read some conference proceedings from 1992.
This is entirely possible but it doesn't address the need for journal subscriptions to access pre-existing articles. As I understand it, unless copyright law changes, if a researcher wants to read online a 1970s paper from Nature, their library has to subscribe to Nature forever (approximately), even if everything they produce from today onwards will be uploaded to github.
It seems the only time I'm ever on Springer or Wiley is to read some conference proceedings from 1992.