PubMed costs a few hundred million a year to run, paid for by taxpayers. If you want us to just pay all journals to run directly from taxes, that's one solution. Then Elsevier can cut out the middleman.
If you don't want taxpayers paying publishers directly, then your solution will result in a lot less publications. I'm not sure either is going to be a better solution for society.
I'm not sure where you're getting these figures from.
> PubMed Central (PMC) costs US taxpayers about $4.45 million per year to run, according to documents recently obtained by an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
The National Library of Medicine's entire budget is $341 million, and they have brick and mortar buildings to maintain and many other responsibilities - there's no way that almost their entire budget would go to paying for PubMed.
PMC is a tiny part of what makes PubMed, and is even considered distinct from PubMed [1]. Dig up the budget for PubMed, not a tiny slice. I've been down this road many times....
Nowhere in that link, nor the article on PubMed describes PMC as a part of PubMed. Moreover, the relevant legal act, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008, requires NIH-funded research to be published in PMC, so it's PMC's budget that is relevant here.
You claimed that PMC is a part of PubMed, but there's nothing that says so. Anyway, NIH-funded research is required to be published on PMC, not PubMed, so the cost of PMC is the one to be examined for the question of a mandatory open access policy. So all of what PubMed does is entirely irrelevant to this question, since PMC is where these have to be published to.
