But searching for and collating all these tens of thousands of papers in each federal repository will have to be done... manually... by every researcher.
.....Oh. You wanted search? You wanted indexing? You wanted a centrally managed service to pull from all those different federal repositories? Well, you're gonna need a company to develop all that and run it. You can use it for a subscription fee. That just happens to be the same cost as access to journals. Or if you're lucky, subsidized by ads for Subway and Nike.
USG already publishes a ton of free data, like weather and maps. The ecosystem of repackaging and building improved services seems to be working fine because it opens up a broad range of competitive options, not a paid embargo to a few.
Sci-Hub is still illegal. If they made a completely separate legal entity that respected copyright, sure, something like that could work. Until that happens, the choice will be "do everything manually" or "break the law", and I don't think a whole lot of universities or corporations will be condoning the latter.
There's also more interests in the world than corporations and universities. an organizational Monopoly on ideas is dangerous - it stifles innovation and destroys competition.
Right now every journal is a monopoly that can charge whatever it wants for as terrible service as it wants. With the change they need to compete with every bored college student who knows beautiful soup.
But searching for and collating all these tens of thousands of papers in each federal repository will have to be done... manually... by every researcher.
.....Oh. You wanted search? You wanted indexing? You wanted a centrally managed service to pull from all those different federal repositories? Well, you're gonna need a company to develop all that and run it. You can use it for a subscription fee. That just happens to be the same cost as access to journals. Or if you're lucky, subsidized by ads for Subway and Nike.
There is no such thing as a free lunch, people.