Comment by civilized

Hosting is a long-solved problem. High-quality repositories have provided free, universally accessible document hosting to the academic world for decades.

The arXiv is a nonprofit organization run by Cornell that hosts preprints, and I wouldn't be surprised if it holds more stuff than all the for-profit publishers combined at this point. The barriers to uploading on the arXiv are very low - all you need is to be at a recognized academic institution or endorsed by someone who works for one.

Resources like arXiv have made official publishing largely superfluous for spreading knowledge in the parts of academia that understand and care about the value of spreading knowledge for free. Analogous archives exist for (at least) biology, medicine, psychology, and economics.

https://info.arxiv.org/about/index.html