[zmb_]

I don't think that's a winning argument. Your tax dollars pay for space rockets and fighter planes too, but you don't get to ride them. There are many such things that you pay for, and that you get some indirect benefits from, including the pay-walled research. And in many fields the researchers take big pay cuts compared to what they'd make in the industry, meaning they are effectively paying a large chunk of the cost of creating the research themselves.

I also don't think requiring open access is the solution. It just ends up pumping more money into the publishers' already ridiculous profit margins, since authors must pay more to have their articles open access while the universities still have to pay for access to the journals. And of course the funding bodies don't increase their funding, so the open access fees just mean less money for salaries and less research getting done.

The solution I advocate is for governments to directly set up and fund high quality open access journals and conferences. Given the choice I'd much rather submit to, and review for, such a venue than a for-profit publisher.

[tombert]

Sure, I'll agree we can't have a completely open-door policy for everything because that would be chaos, but for stuff that's easy to make copies of I think we should.

So to go with your example, I agree we don't all get to ride in spaceships (much as I'd like to), but I do think that it's not unreasonable to request the rocket designs and published papers that came out of NASA when they were building these rockets.