The article doesn't touch on the fact that all this scholarship, usually funded in some way with taxes, is locked up behind pay walls unless you want to pay $10

The article doesn't touch on the fact that all this scholarship, usually funded in some way with taxes, is locked up behind pay walls unless you want to pay $10-$40 per article (that's probably a bigger obstacle). However, ArXiv works because at least with harder sciences you have proofs and empirical results that are more clearly defined. Most of the stuff on arxiv is also published in peer reviewed journals. That's why they are called preprints.