All everything 'should' be free. At least, that which is not scarce.
The correct question to ask is 'can' all research papers be free - does the world continue to spin, will research still happen, will we still progress, if they are free?
The only reason we even have this debate to begin with is because the producers of this information require scarce/controlled resources in order to survive.
This is so not true. Closed-access journals do not pay authors. There's no advance. There are no royalties. At best, they don't charge authors for publishing their work. They don't pay reviewers, and typically not even editors. Maybe they do pay for editing. But that is minuscule cost, relative to $30 per copy.
What happened here is that jerks hijacked the academic publishing industry. They turned a system that was largely pro bono publico into an intellectual pyramid scam. Academia has been slow to respond, mired in the web of prestigious citation. But maybe this is the end game.
Producers are funded by grants or private research funding. They get no money that are paid for access to articles, that is why they publish preprints for free.
It's not exactly post-scarcity, it's just zero marginal cost. It's true that, given the product has already been created and has zero marginal cost, it "should" be free. But for setting the expectations that producers of future products have about what compensation they'll receive we can't simply say it should be free.
That is how private research is funded, say at Microsoft Research. You agree on "deliverables" and get your money for each stage of your work. Deliverables include tech reports, source code, prototypes and things like that. You get nothing after your stop working on the project. For producers, i.e. researchers, this scheme is not worse than grants and getting money for published articles, citations etc., they don't get money for years after the publication anyway.
Posting in a seperate comment here as I was mainly aiming to provoke debate with the original one.
This generally chimes with my feeling. It seems to me that the users of research can derive vastly different value from it and so the flat price model doesn't really work.
Consider some new research on light emitting diodes and the value Samsung might get from that vs. me reading it out of curiosity.
For that reason, to me it makes sense to treat academic research as infrastructure and have free access to all funded via taxation.
The correct question to ask is 'can' all research papers be free - does the world continue to spin, will research still happen, will we still progress, if they are free?
The only reason we even have this debate to begin with is because the producers of this information require scarce/controlled resources in order to survive.