The publishers are either given the material for free and readers have to pay, or the researchers pay the publishers on the order of $2k per page to have their research published as open access. Not great in either case.
Surely, there's a middle way. Since we are talking about a club good [1], a club would be the appropriate alternative. Assuming a fee of 20$/month for people in developed countries and 100.000 members, this would cover about 1.000 papers per month.
http://openwetware.org/wiki/Publication_fees