My funding councils want people to publish in open-access journals, but they don't provide extra funds for the doubling of cost that's involved. The money has to come from somewhere, and the main cost item tends to be student stipends, so professors tend to continue publishing in pay-access journals.
I've been on both sides of the "fetch for a friend" process. I've had to ask friends to fetch copies of papers that I've written, for which I've paid page charges, because my university had to drop the journal in one or another waves of cost saving.
And for all this money, the journals do very little in the way of contributing to the process, nowadays. Reviewers work for free, as do most academic editors. Technical editors seem to barely exist anymore, since authors do their own typesetting and journals rely on academic reviewers to help with English.
Academics are caught in a narrowing vice as they move through the career process. Papers have to appear in high-reputation journals, or else. And those journals just happen to be expensive.