Imagine if every conference charged speakers for speaking, and in order to get promoted you had to speak at those conferences. It's the same thing. Except most software engineers are happy not paying to speak at conferences because their promo doesn't require it.
Journals like Nature and Science are usually considered the top (at least for physics, which I studied). Getting even one article published in these is a big deal. As a grad student you've got it made for when you apply for a post doc.
The irony is that most (probably all) of the researchers would gladly want their articles shared widely, and I couldn't see any researcher in favour of restricting access to an interested party wanting to see their work.
That said, if you're not in academia, you may have good luck emailing professors directly asking if they can share a copy of their paper. I've been out of school for several years now, but professors sometimes even included such PDFs on their webpages for general public consumption. Not sure if that violates any terms of the publishing journal though.
I'm not sure if some journals like Nature prevent or discourage you from doing this.
Some journals allow us to post the post-review paper (at any rate, the changes are usually mostly cosmetic).
They are now selling the IP division that owns the Impact Factor. No news just yet (as far as I am aware) on who will end up buying it, but depending on who it is I could potentially see some backlash (finally) within academia if there's an unavoidable conflict of interest (ie if Elsevier buys it). That said, inertia is stronger than anyone wants to admit in academia, so I wouldn't be surprised if IF stays the dominant force in academic reputation for a long time to come. But maybe, just maybe, the time is right for the fall of Impact Factor.
A big part of success in modern scientific research is ability to secure funding, so if you put your thumbs on the scales enough, it could catalyze a move to open access journals as the "prestigious journals."
One of the major problem is that bibliometrics criteria are necessarily impacted by inertia of prestige, and publishers own the title of the most prestigious journals.
Older, tenured scientists could just go and stop publishing in those journals to build up the prestige of new (really) open access ones, but the fact is that most often they co-authors papers with their students or at least younger, un-tenured scientists, and they understandably don't want to sacrifice the careers of the new generation.
Some funding agencies now requires that work they fund are made open access, but sadly, publishers lobby in the US and in Bruxelles weight a lot in favor of "authors pay" model, and many funding agencies includes publishing budget in research grant for this reason. That is very frustrating because people mix up real open access with open access paid by authors, while 1- other economical models are possible (see my other comments on this page), and 2- countries and funding agencies could legally enforce that every papers published in a non-open access journal must be made available immediately in an open repository such as arXiv, overruling the decision of publishers who often put an embargo of e.g. 2 years before this can be done.
See for example http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/science/asap-bio-biologist...
A few stipulations come along with publishing preprints -- for example, IEEE makes you take down the preprint and add a copyright notice to it after your paper has been accepted.
Why not publish in both places ?