What I don't get is...why don't governments simply declare that all research at publicly funded universities must be made available to the public. It's seems so trivial. You pay the researchers, you get the research results, you make it available for all citizens (or the world).
Companies do this, they keep the research results of their employees.
A major reason, unfortunately, is that they don't want to be interfering with the distribution of scientific articles. For example, if there's a very well-read journal in a specific discipline, but whose contents are only visible with a subscription, then if one countries prevents its researchers from publishing in those journals, research by that country's researchers will be less read. And the reason they do not want to do that, is because they by all means want to avoid being able to suppress the reach of research whose conclusions they might not like, to prevent situations like when the Catholic church was able to do so.
(That is, if they are actually actively aware of and see it as a problem. Lots of governments/funders also don't have an active Open Access policy, although this is starting to change.)
Eh, I think you're stretching in your interpretation of the causes of our current science publishing climate. As a current researcher, and former scientific publisher, I think most authors are interested in hitting certain "target" journals, it's a discussion that comes up early on in the research process. They want the right topic audience to read their work, and they want to publish in the highest impact factor journal they can. Some university departments requiore that researchers publish in multiple high impact, or many more low impact, journals before they get tenure. So, I believe countries are mostly unaware of this problem, except for UK and now others, as the UK has been demanding their publicly funded research be open source for a few years.
To me, the problem is that scientists are highly motivated to achieve successes in publishing and prestige and impact, and they are less likely to stand in front of governments and demand open-access and freely circulated articles. This is not in their best interest, I would argue, however they are EXTREMELY busy people, researchers work 60-70 hours with a multitude of different duties. It's not at all surprising they don't have the time to lobby congress vociferously on behalf of the commons.
> I believe countries are mostly unaware of this problem
Yes, that's what I was referring to in my ellipsis.
> To me, the problem is that scientists are highly motivated to achieve successes in publishing and prestige and impact, and they are less likely to stand in front of governments and demand open-access and freely circulated articles. This is not in their best interest
I agree that that is a crucial link in the vicious cycle that upholds the current system - I was merely giving a view in the motivations of why even the funders who are aware of the problem are not mandating Open Access without extra costs.
If you google "open access eu", you'll find a lot of articles reporting in 2016 on an EU initiative to have all its funded research open access by 2020. I wonder how that has come along since...
Companies do this, they keep the research results of their employees.