The government subsidizes research because we believe that research provides a public good that cannot be easily packaged and sold at a profit. So even though you are able to sell trade journals and such, the benefit to society is actually much greater than the price of the journal. Okay, fine. We subsidize vaccines, education, all sorts of stuff. We probably don't subsidize research enough, especially when you consider rapidly dropping funding for our public universities.<p>But the point of a subsidy is to make the producers of a good produce more of it than they would otherwise by making it more profitable for them to do so. If you were to ban profiting off of research at all, then you'd actually be discouraging the production of that good.<p>Some people have been arguing lately for something even more absurd, which is that if a university receives any public funding at all, then all of their research has been tainted by the transitive property of government funding and must be released to everyone for free and fuck the hard work the researchers put into it.<p>You're essentially asking for the government to limit all science funding to only government projects, like the government is commissioning science to be done. This puts too much control in the hands of bureaucrats and the ebb and flow of politics.<p>If, on the other hand, you want the government to provide the service of providing research to the general public, we have something like that and they're called libraries. Maybe you should band together to improve the kinds of services libraries offer.