There are potential big antitrust issues with some of the gigantic, multinational, billion-dollar publishers that impose these conditions, but I suggested a solution yesterday that got some good feedback on the Internet, for what that's worth.
The solution came not from me but from Roy MacSkimming, who's a long-time expert who did this work for the Public Lending Right Commission in Canada. He suggested what he called an educational lending right, which would require government funding but would compensate scholarly authors, like Professor de Beer and Professor Boyer, for the use of their work in educational institutions, much like we already have for public libraries where popular authors like Margaret Atwood get up to $3,000 per year for their books being lent. That amount has gone down. It should go up. It needs new funding.
Something like that for the educational realm would provide additional income and incentive for professors, and I also pointed out that professors are rewarded in other ways. If they write papers and books, they get promoted and they get tenure. Finally they're getting decent salaries now—six-figure salaries in Canadian universities—so it's not as if they're not being paid. It's just that they're not being paid as efficiently and elegantly as perhaps they should be.