I'd like to better understand why researchers are not taking more of a stand against Elsevier et al.
Not every journal is a viable option, not every journal has the same rating. In theory everyone would prefer to publish in an open access journal but sometimes there's an extra fee for that or there's no good (reputable, good impact factor and appropriate for that topic) open access journal for your project...
That means that an amazing paper published in PLoS ONE is generally worse for your career than an unreplicable pile of drek in Nature. The quality of the paper, barring notable impact outliers, is secondary to the journal it's published in.
While more established researchers can turn down the chance to publish in one of the big, closed journals, it's an opportunity that many cannot turn down.
I agree. And stronger than that, recently some funding agencies (e.g. the Dutch NWO) favor/require open access for works that come out of projects they fund, and they have budget set aside for that. The trend is hopefully changing, but it takes time.
Most people don't.
And many who do avoid it like the plague.
If you would like your work to gather some visibility, I would highly recommend making it available for free, eg publishing the PDF on github.
btw, it looks like there is an error with the cert for ironbci.com ? Edit: uh, I guess my phone just didn’t like that it was over http, nevermind
here is open access for paper
Not accessible without login.
Please publish your work on an actual open access site.
Even better, please make it available to sci-hub.