[SeanAppleby]

When you say "low impact factor", you're referring to a combination of lack of prestige and lack of readership that leads to few citations and subsequently little influence on the field, right?

If so, why is the prestigious curation of the journal that leads academics to reading your paper and taking it seriously inextricably tied to whether or not it's behind a paywall at all?

What's stopping someone from building an alternative curation pipeline on top of open access journals that gives academics equal or better signal/noise to the journals they read, and a similar socially accepted prestige for getting into that curation pipeline?

I get that there's not a clear path to monetization, but maybe it's possible, particularly if you could execute more targeted curation for academic subfields that are too small to have their own journals, that you could find some donors and lean on academics supporting the curation process themselves out of their seeming discontent with publishing to drive down costs.

[refurb]

Yes, many (but not all) of the top journals are closed.

A lot of scientists talk big when it comes to open access, but when it comes time for them to publish their own work, they published in closed journals since they have a bigger impact factor.

They basically put their own careers ahead of their belief in supporting open access.

[qpiox]

The publishers want to have some financial income from your papers. So if you want a paper to be openly accessible, so preventing them from a future income from that paper, as an author you will have to pay their potential incomes, and this can cost up to 3000$ per publication.

That is a substantial sum even for professors from wealthy countries.

[Calloutman]

I understand that completely. Feeling good about yourself for sticking it to the man doesn't support a family.