I find it fascinating that the web changed just about every industry out there, apart from the one it set out to change - academic publishing.. It's still an oligopoly, with the same, small number of players acting as gatekeepers
They have the power to do that.
30 years after the great gift of the web we are still waiting, and Alexandra Elbakyan has shown us how amazing it is to have all scientific papers be available to everyone.
> indeed many fields and subfields do not use such closed-access journals
This would maybe make for a good public ranking—showing a list of fields and percentage of open access journals—and hopefully academic in closed fields would adapt quickly to avoid the embarrassment.
RIP Aaron Swartz
To me it’s one of the high points of the web and Paul Ginsparg is an absolute hero for setting it up; he reviews some of its history at https://arxiv.org/abs/1108.2700.
I think it’s an interesting social question why other fields have taken so much longer to adopt the arxiv model.