> Isn't that still in the $500-$1,000 range of non-redundant storage?

Sure. Let's add redundancy and bump by an order of magnitude to give some headroom -- $5-10k is a totally reasonable amount to fundraise for this sort of application. If it were legal, I'm sure any number of universities would happily shoulder that cost. It's miniscule compared to what they're paying Elsevier each year.

Sorry. My point was it was a lot of money precisely because it cannot legally exist. If it could collect donations via a commercial payment processor, it could raise that much money from end users easily. Or grants from institutions. But in this case it seems like it has to be self-funded.

I'm prepared to accept "does generate no revenue" but "can generate no revenue" ...?

Perhaps some sort of MTurk or captcha-like tasks per access? Patr[e]ons? Donation drives? Micro-payments? Something else??

Oh, it could generate revenue if it was legal. But it is not, so it seems difficult.

For an institution, it's a rounding error.

AWS is not the cheapest bulk-storage hosting possible.