Yeah, fortunately I think it's improving in the area of scientific papers.

As most scientific research is conducted using at least some tax payer funds in the first place. But there are middle men, like Elsevier, that are clearly profiting by charging for something the public already paid for.

Organizations are now insisting their papers are made available for free.

Libraries should be able to provide this stuff.

Still have a copy of the ECMAScript Language Specification from 1999, that was printed, bound and mailed to me at no cost from ECMA.