This is not a technology problem. People send their papers to reputable journals because of their reputation and journals have a good reputation because everybody wants to publish there. Getting papers into a big journal is nearly the only benchmark academics have when it comes to getting a job or tenure.
AFAIK from my colleague doing PhD in Europe, one of the main issues is Impact Factor. The universities play "gather the points" game, and you get, say, 35 points for publishing in a major (paywalled, expensive) title while you may get only, say, 18 or 10 points if you published in another (non-paywalled, less expensive, less reputable) journal.
If you have less points than other people, you don't get a grant, or you're more likely to not have your contract extended etc.
The ministry reevaluates the (journal's IF<->points per publication) mapping each year, but it takes a few years for a new journal to get significant number of points. Publishing in low-IF journals if your paper could be accepted by a major one is a career suicide.
The hidden implication is that the system reinforces the power of the all-powerful top journals.
Another important point, is that lower IF journals generally have a smaller audience than high IF journals. This is really important for how many times your articles are expected to be cited. Your H-index [1] is now sometimes requested from funding institutions, and I'm starting to see it on resumes. It's all kind of sad.
So, in a lot of ways, the competitive research culture isn't helping inaccessible/exclusivity journal problem, since researchers are actively seeking out those journals.
I completely agree (I am currently a scientist). It's a very hard problem to solve. I'd love working on it and in many ways it can be framed as a tech startup type of problem since it is essentially trying to build a consensus network. In a theoretical world in which I have retirement level money that would probably be the issue I'd try to fix for the rest of my life (unfortunately expecting no progress).
Mathematics seems like the most promising field to start with if you follow a bowling pin type of strategy. There have been some boycotts of Elsevier etc. from math departments and they have somewhat of a "free publishing" tradition at least from my outside point of view. It's also an excellent viral starting point because you can infiltrate other disciplines that tend to cite math papers (physics, machine learning, economics etc.)
I think it is a technology problem, because the journals exist in the first place to solve a technology problem: How to distribute, quality assure etc a paper. Without internet this obviously cost a fair amount of money. Nobody was going to just print copies of journals and distribute them for free.
I doubt a system like the journals would have developed in a world where internet already existed.
I think a variation of the system used to build the Linux kernel could have worked for scientific papers as well. In the Kernel you have a pyramid of trust. Linux trust some people directly, who again each trust another set of people. This continues downwards. In this fashion code can be signed off and bubble up through the hierarchy.
I suspect in similar fashion a scientific paper could bubble up by being reviewed by ever more respected scientists in a hierarchy.
Thanks for clarifying, I was replying to the technological insight in kriro's post however.
Btw, is technology here completely irrelevant? The way to access content is pretty important after all. In a decentralized publishing system, what is reputation? Maybe it could be an intrinsic measure with a ranking system of some sort. But this is pretty hard. Maybe the "natural" way to publish content has no unique or sensical way to quantify prestige. The following question arises: is prestige a good criterion to judge science?
