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This thing about online journals keeps coming up in this thread. Why do you all think that online journal publishing if free?! Most journals do publish online, and access in general is _not_ free. It _costs_ a lot of money to publish a journal, whether it is on paper or in bits. So even if, as you say, financial backers (this is a very poor and inaccurate term) mandated online publication, as NIH has thought about doing, the problem would be to either find enough free (as in beer) online journals of high quality, or to convince commercial publishers to grant open access. The former option is still very inadequate. There is a growing number of good, open access online journals, but not enough of them. They are in general run by scientists and scientific societies, and no, so far there has been very little "tax payer" support for them. That means a lot of time and money coming from the personal funds of scientists, not government funds. And trust me, it's a lot of work. The second option has seen some progress: some journals will now allow you to make your article open access if you pay a fee. Sometimes the "financial backers" will provide funds for this, but mostly no. So again, you are asking scientists to shell out hundreds to thousands of dollars of either limited research funds or personal funds so that someone else can read their article for free. The best solutions I think are: (1) continue to promote the growth of non-profit open access journals, and (2) convince commerical publishers to open access to journals after a period of time has elapsed.
To reiterate -- online publishing does not equal free.

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