And what's worse, when there were some big negotiations on open access a few years back, the agreements were wholly insufficient and still disproportionately enriched the journals at the expense of researchers; "Gold Open Access" journals will publish the research unpaywalled, so anyone can read them, but will charge absurd "article processing charges" that are often thousands of dollars, shutting out researchers with less financial means (such as those in the global South or independent researchers).

Fortunately there is a growing movement who gives a fuck about actual open access; Diamond Open Access research involves no fees to either the author or the reader. This is how it should be.

'The diamond model has been especially successful in Latin America-based journals (95% of OA journals[1]) following the emergence of large publicly supported platforms, such as SciELO and Redalyc. However, Diamond OA journals are under-represented in the major scholarly databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus. It is also noteworthy, that high-income countries "have the highest share of authorship in every domain and type of journal, except for diamond journals in the social sciences and humanities".'^[1]

The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed

[1]: Source: the linked Wikipedia page

It's pretty impressive that they managed to trick a whole field of the smartest people into doing it too. What kind of crazy con artist thought this up? Lol

Until the world accepts that certain bloodlines should just be purged, progress is impossible.