Many scientists can't be bothered to put their papers online once they get tenure. The system right now gets university libraries to pay journal publishers to publish papers. Taking away the profit motive from this system can be a nice social experiment. Maybe we'll end up living in some kind of a socialist paradise where everyone gets the papers they want for free.
I never said it can't ever work in practice. Either it will or it won't. But then again, I'm not the one who's calling to abolish a working system that has served science for decades.
There is a small detail however that probably warrants the abolition of this "working system that has served science for decades": thanks to the Internet, distribution costs are kinda non-existent now.
And I tend to think that, where sharing costs you nothing, the socialist dream is quite possible.
