[DanielleMolloy]

The business model of these large publishing companies is not selling access, it is peer review. Science and Nature keep their reputation despite Elsevier because it is notoriously hard to pass their peer review process, and the academic world trusts it.

We may live in a better academic world if rigorous peer reviewing was a full-time paid job. Presumably it would not be difficult to do better than 90% of the current peer reviewing by letting people with full-time experience (and the overview of the state of science that comes with it) do it. It may also solve a couple of other problems with anonymous peer reviewing.

(eventually with ever-more complex methodology and involvement of complex programming routines and tools we still have to get rid of the scientific paper as the main form of communication)