I think a common misunderstanding, often held on HN/Reddit, is that the academia themselves also hate journal publishing industry as much. I mean, of course no

I think a common misunderstanding, often held on HN/Reddit, is that the academia themselves also hate journal publishing industry as much. I mean, of course none of us like them, and everyone hates the pressure that you have to publish papers to keep your job or to be promoted. But all these are independent to how the industry makes money and especially very irrelevant to the fact that most of journals aren't open-access. Almost all universities/institutions have subscriptions of majority of journals. And most "proper" journals don't charge you (the authors) a fee to publish. Yes, they usually don't pay you when they asked you to review, which sucks. But the whole thing isn't as bad from a practical perspective. Again it's still a annoyance from time to time, just not that bad. Furthermore, unfortunately, a way to judge how good you're at research would be needed anyway. If the journal publishing industry died overnight, there would be other metric coming up and as toxic. TL;DR: scientific publishing industry is a leech but they leech on the fact scientists/researchers needing a way to build their prestige. Not on them directly. That's why most don't have a too strong opinion or act on it.