Scholarly research is locked behind expensive paywalls. Writers, artists and the researchers themselves fight back.
Let me set up a hypothetical situation here: I'm a subject matter expert. You want me to review this paper that was submitted, to see if it is up to the standards of your publication. It is a dense piece, at the edges of innovation in my field, so it is going to take some serious brain power and time for me to review the paper, assess its findings, and then provide you with my official recommendation/feedback. Ok. What are you going to pay me for this service? For my expertise? For my decades of schooling and experience that have made me a subject matter expert in my field? My Question: In the world where "information wants to be free", and it is trivial to share any piece of data with any other person in the world, who pays for the highly specialized and skilled service above? Where does that money come from?
It's volunteer work for a for-profit company. Journals don't pay scientists. Scientists pay journals to publish in them, then the journals ask someone to review it. The reward for that work is padding the CV, and that's pretty much it. It's "you get exposure", except because academia is as Taylorized as everywhere else afflicted with administrators, it is actually worth paying journals to leech of your work and volunteering to do their editing for them. They still exist because of tradition and because universities are just businesses with pretensions at this point and are run by the same asshats as every other business and these are the arbitrary hoops those asshats have decided to judge their employees' ability to jump through.
I study Anthropology, and this is a pretty hotly debated topic in my field. One of my professors, who does his work in Ghana, never even saw the finished version of one of his articles until one of his informants gave him a pirated PDF of it. He would have had to pay about $40 just to get a digital copy of his own work. It's particularly shitty because many scholarly journals don't even allow their writers to reproduce their articles for free once they have them published, so if they want to fight back and have their articles freely available, they essentially have to either be unpublished, or published in much more obscure sources.
In math and computer science posting your preprint is a pretty common. I rarely need to use a library/professional society account to read papers because CiteSeer or Google can usually find the preprint for me. I think physicists do it too, but maybe am_Unition will correct me. That might only work well because most of those papers are typeset by authors rather than by the journal, so that the preprint is pretty much identical to what gets published though.