It's worth noting that the computer science community (at least in systems and machine learning) have already made some strides in this direction. Systems conferences like VLDB and CIDR post the proceedings online for free (and most ICDE and SIGMOD articles are available through the author's website). In machine learning, almost every conference paper is also available via arXiv.
When a paper is seemingly not available online, I've always gotten a free copy via an email to the author... And then there's sci-hub. It's not the way it should be (i.e. you shouldn't have to hunt around for publicly-funded research), but at least it's something.
When a paper is seemingly not available online, I've always gotten a free copy via an email to the author... And then there's sci-hub. It's not the way it should be (i.e. you shouldn't have to hunt around for publicly-funded research), but at least it's something.