A friend calls the latter bridge trolls. They find a useful resource that someone created and many need, and aim to extract a toll for it - without having created it.
Let’s be more like the creators and less like the bridge trolls.
The problem going forward is in breaking the stranglehold over academic careers that prestige journals have, a key source of their power. In order to gain entry into or promotion through academic ranks, academics in many fields must publish in prestige journals, many owned by the monopoly cartel.
There's also the small matter of the 60+ million previously published academic articles, many under a copyright regime which would have seen them enter the public domain years or decades ago, which remain locked behind copyright prisons.
In short: your idea's not bad, it's actually being implemented. It remains difficult to implement because of structural reasons, and still only addresses a part of the problem.
It might worth it to repeat part of my comment in [1]:
> The current business model as a whole is a legacy institution based on earlier monopoly by a charlatan named Maxwell [2]. He basically lured scientist by shiny hotels+extra packages to build the initial reputation and then monopolize the entire industry for decades. You can find a good review of this scheme from below YouTube video[3].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29218202
