Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research.

>> No, Public interest in research is what keeps funding higher.

     Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?

>> Researchers publishing papers dont earn a penny, the only thing that they get is free (no charge to researcher) dissemination. In fact a lot of researchers post a free version on there own web site.

I have published two papers in journal published by American Chemical Society and authors are allowed to put up pre-publication / non edited copy of their papers on their own website. ACS also provides a link from which upto 50 visitors can download the authors paper for free in first year and there is no limit after first year.

E.g. http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/download.pl?ie0704647/P8Lu is free link to my first paper, the article is behind the firewall but if you use above link, you can get it for free.