Become a Nobel-winning physicist?
You've touched on several issues which could feed a series of lengthy discussions.
I've seen both sides of the serials crisis, both as a librarian who worked in academic libraries and as a librarian who worked for a major scientific publisher (AAAS, publisher of Science). I was at Science during the period when we were figuring out how to make the online version available to libraries and institutions. I was also there when Science made the correct decision to embrace the new open access science journals and public archives like PLOS.
Librarians have been pretty pissed about STM serials and their price-gouging of libraries. One of the worst offenders is Elsevier.
Ironically, the anarchistic open journal movement has developed into a credible alternative to traditonal over-priced journals. Librarians have jumped onto this bandwagon, much to the consternation of evil scum like Elsevier.
Joseph bring up another issue, that being scientists being paid little for their papers being published. I haven't seen the figure, but I understand that many scientists are more concerned about getting published than in being compensated financially. The university tenure system helps drive the overabundance of STM journals. You can understand why librarians are hesitant about subscribing to expensive journals which are more or less vanity presses for the tenure process.
I'll end with another twist on this subject. A few years ago I was the guest on some radio show in Seattle. I can't remember what the topic was, perhaps globalization, but I must have said something about how Big Pharma was patenting knowledge from research that derived from public sources. Some rep from a pharmaceutical company called in to challenge me, arguing that pharmaceutical companies were the ones who came up with most of the original research that lead to new medicines. Thus, they had to patent their discoveries. I replied by asking this person if the pharmaceutical companies would be willing to prevent their researchers from accessing research coming out of public universities. After all, if Big Pharma didn't need research from the public sphere, then perhaps they should cut off access to that public knowledge.
Chuck