[tw4l]

They could! They'd have to also change how faculty review and tenure work, to incentivize faculty to publish in alternative open access journals instead of the top (paywalled) journals in their field. Otherwise, faculty will continue publishing with the for-profit publishers even if there's alternatives available.

[elashri]

There are a for proft open access journals. In most open access journals, the payment system is just reversed. The author/s pay a huge amount of money as publication fees (usually a couple of thousands) instead of readers (or their institutions) paying for the article or the journal subscription.

[UncleMeat]

Heck, even the widely hated publishing companies offer open access. It just costs thousands of dollars for an article and tens of thousands of dollars for a book.

[zx8080]

Why would any researcher want to pay it?

[elashri]

Most of the time, it is not even up to the researchers to decide that. Open access is usually a requirement by the funding agencies. For example, in the US all federally funded research will be required to be published on open access journals and will be enforced at the end of 2025[1]

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/08/25/ostp...