[pavlov]

I don't understand how governments have the authority to make private companies (journal publishers) give-away their product for free. --- It's rightly owned by the publishers.

Are you American? I ask because this comment reflects a particularly American notion of property as an immutable, "God-given" right. In this thinking, governments exist to protect private property, not define it.

As someone else pointed out, the concept of intellectual property only exists in law that is inherently mutable. And whether the government can take away someone's property by redefining it as not property -- that's a question over which Americans once fought a bloody civil war.