[anologwintermut]

Most research papers are findable via Google. Authors post them online. The better argument for open access is merely that universities shouldn't be paying for or private parties profiting from providing access to publicly funded research

Often times, the knowledge guild is actually never put down on paper. You, sadly, need to be at a university where people are working on what you want to be able to do anything. Papers are just waypoints.

[vlasev]

It's often such a PITA to find free research papers if you don't have access to the paid journals. If it's just one paper, it's not such a big issue. The trouble is one of scale. A researcher usually puts a lot of time into looking for all the references and papers to read. If this researcher doesn't have direct free access to these papers and has to look them up on google every time, this increases the overhead significantly. We're talking about dozens of papers just to get started well on a topic.

Here's an example. When I did math research last summer at my university, I looked at 16 papers. It took a while to gather these even with my university account with which I obtained the articles for free. If I had to google every single article, it would have taken me much more time - at least double if not triple the time.

[Someone]

Devils's advocate: if no "private parties profiting from providing access to publicly funded research" should exist, shouldn't you be opposed to "Most research papers are findable via Google.", too? Google is making profits from publicly fundable research, too.

IMO, there is nothing wrong with companies making a profit from providing access to publicly funded research; the only problems are lack of competition and (IMO consequently) profit margins that society finds unjust.

The former, I think, is being settled. More and more new research is effectively open access. The latter, then, will follow.

And to your second point: there used to be companies that had university-like environments where short-time profits do not rule the day (AT&T, Xerox, Philips Natlab, Apple's ATG). Nowadays, Google and Microsoft Research still have similar groups.