Oh Bill Gates, I love you! This is a wonderful step forward and maybe the beginning of the end for avaricious publishers. As a taxpayer I'm asked to pay £20 to access a single article written in 1960 on work financed and reviewed courtesy of taxpayers. This is madness.
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I agree with you. I want to point out though that the older interlibrary loan system still exists, if you want to access papers off-line and at a cheaper rate.
For example, http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/ill/ says "Anyone who has access to the [Cambridge] University Library may use this service. The fee for an Inter-Library Loan request is currently £3.00 for members of Cambridge University and £6.00 for all other readers."
And for Sheffield, http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/services/ilcharges suggests it would be £9.40 for an article.
I don't know about the UK, but here in Sweden it's easy to get a library card for the local university library, and access to their ILL services.