Comment by harshreality

Journals are not about providing access to science, much less public access.

Journals are an academic-career-advancement service. It therefore makes sense that they do not pay academics. You don't pay your customers.

That means they need to generate a secondary customer base elsewhere, who will pay. Those secondary customers happen to be the employers of the academics who are the primary customers. That socializes the cost of providing the service, since academics individually wouldn't be willing and able to pay.

Once journals have established a reputation, their policies and paywalls and fees are the result of trying to signal exclusivity and set an optimum market price.

Until the supply side of the research market largely agrees on a way to use open-access repositories like arXiv as a primary career-advancement signal, complaining about closed-access journals is tilting at windmills.

Changing the law to prevent journals from being able to copyright anything could potentially force the research industry to rapidly develop a new solution, but at the cost of short-term chaos and career instability for new academics.