> How is science to evolve if good research requires $49 a pop to view?

This kind of criticism is misplaced. The answer to reputable journals being held hostage by the likes of Elsevier is not dropping peer review and dump articles in a blog-like site such as Arxiv.

I'm confident the bulk of academia would love to move away from Elsevier et al and have free open journals as their discourse venue. However, the publish or perish situation created pressure to count only the papers published in reference publications in their productivity metrics, and those were hijacked by for-profit editorial companies which unscrupulously abuse their dominant entrenched position.

And publishing on Arxiv does not change that.