40k/year sounds quite high for life-saving information. Life-saving information should be free (or, rather, whatever necessary costs it has should be socialized).
I think that's a great point--socialization is a solution that should be considered a realistic option. It seems like publishing would have a comparable bureaucratic load to that faced by science funding agencies.
It's a complex topic though. The papers are distinct from the research (and public money), and the authors willfully give publishers the rights to their writing. This is also not "free" but in exchange for prestige for promotions, etc. I don't think this is a good system though, but it's legal. NIH does require open access after one year for publicly funded work, at least, but I think a better solution is to require summary reports submitted directly to NIH for every project.
Even better would be to do away with reports and journal articles that only report a tiny fraction experimental data, and focus more on "selling" the science rather than reporting it. I suspect there is a very large overlap in research, thousands of animals are being killed needlessly, simply because the data that is not published in articles is discarded, even though they could be useful for other studies.
