Think "publish" in the 1940's magazine sense - which is pretty much the distribution model for all "traditional" academic journals. If Famous_Author publishes an article in The Saturday Evening Post - maybe you're a subscriber to The Saturday Evening Post. Or you head to a brick-and-mortar library which subscribes, to read the article there. Or you pay Cover_Price, in cash, to a news stand or drug store or whatever, to get your dead-tree copy of the issue in question.

Anybody willing to pay for it, yes. Typically tens of dollars per article or thousands/year for a subscription. It's not like scientists get any of that money though, it's just one more case of publishers squeezing scientists.