This was kind of the case before. Emperors and kings would sponsor large libraries where research were made public to anyone visiting. And this would attract a lot of scholars to these cities where they would be learning and then even teach others. The purpose of this was to gain cultural influence, technological supremacy and military tactical advantages. I am not just talking about the ancient Greek and the Library at Alexandria here but these programs were also heavily funded by people like Louis XXIV of France, Cathrine the Great of Russia and is how institutions like the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge were founded and operated.

The cost of gaining this knowledge was that you had to travel to the library and even ask for permission to read the research. But this started to change when printing took off and papers could be printed and mailed to whoever wanted it. But this did of course have fees associated with it. Printing was fairly cheap but still cost money and the postal dues also cost some. So you were expected to pay these costs. Eventually as the peer review process were better established and regular journals were published with the best papers the costs of administration were included as well as the printing and mailing. These made sense and you could usually go to the university library of the authors to read the paper for free.

The issue was when computers and the Internet came about. Most of the administrative and practical aspects of running a scientific journal were gone over night. But the fees still remained as they were. There have been much less focus on reducing these fees then there should be. And the owners of these journals knows this and provides excellent service to the libraries that pay these fees to prevent them from arguing over price. It is just considered the cost of research.

There are quite a bit of push towards open access journals, mostly from political and individual academics rather then from the academic institutions themselves. So we are slowly getting there but it is a very slow process.