For most research purposes this is awful, though. Usually one's a lot more interested in this or that specific paper than in a random journal edition, as it is

For most research purposes this is awful, though. Usually one's a lot more interested in this or that specific paper than in a random journal edition, as it is well known that both (1) academic journals end up having a low signal-to-noise ratio and (2) compounding that, most academic knowledge is very specific, so most of what's around will feel like uninteresting tripe to all but the most easily excitable reader (and I say this as a wannabe cs academic). It's easy to forget how I am that machine learning and natural language processing have seemed to neatly avoid most closed-access traps (ACM, IEEE, Springer, Elsevier) and instead rely on open conferences and journals (and the closed-access Computational Linguistics journal is very often full of expanded versions of good ACL papers), and at the same time most researchers do realize that more people reading their work means more influence.