Stanford maintains an extensive catalog of research papers: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/in00000064276
When I buy a keyboard, the manufacturer doesn’t run a shipping company, so they use $x from the purchase price to subcontract shipping. (They tell me it’s separate at billing, but they don’t make me ring up DSL myself either.)
When I hire an electrician, they buy materials from Home Depot, so they use $x from the purchase price for materials. (They sometimes break down the bill into materials and labor, but they don’t make me drive to Home Depot myself and buy every part.)
When the public hires academics to do research, they have administrative overhead and have to hire a publisher, so they use $x from the grant for administrative overhead and…
Abdicate responsibility for the $y needed for publishing and pretend the public didn’t intend for part of the grant money to go to that??
The arXiv is a nonprofit organization run by Cornell that hosts preprints, and I wouldn't be surprised if it holds more stuff than all the for-profit publishers combined at this point. The barriers to uploading on the arXiv are very low - all you need is to be at a recognized academic institution or endorsed by someone who works for one.
Resources like arXiv have made official publishing largely superfluous for spreading knowledge in the parts of academia that understand and care about the value of spreading knowledge for free. Analogous archives exist for (at least) biology, medicine, psychology, and economics.
