In part it's prestige, which for some might matter for promotion purposes, and at least personally I'm more like to cite journals for which I know I trust their judgement in peer review and submission acceptance. There are predatory publishers which abuse the open access concept to make money, and if I'm reviewing literature I don't want to have to also research if a journal can be trusted (unless of course the publication I want to include is novel or especially worthwhile).

Also, in many contexts open access requires payment by the authors; this may be fine if an author is in a large grant-funded lab or at an institution willing to fund the open access fee but for many of us non-research-track folks it's kind of a deal breaker.

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Thank you for the warning. I almost received free and convenient access to a large catalog of academic articles, and no one wants that.

And sometimes open access costs money for the author too.

Don't give them ideas.

Don't give them ideas for free.

Absolutely. Plus scientists love when people want to actually read their work so you make their day too!

I do it all the time. Something something sci-hub. If you ask, the authors will almost always share a preprint.

Very frequently you can email the author of the paper and they will be super happy to send you a copy.

I've never gotten a stipend or heard of someone getting a stipend for publishing or reviewing manuscripts. The only thing I've been offered is access to the journal.

Clout and also many academic focused universities expect some set minimum of publications from their staff

They all got bought up by venture capitalists like a decade or more more ago, and this is the result.

They were already backward, but now they are backward, ruthless about cost cutting, and care about nothing but profits.

Really? I’ve reviewed and published a good chunk of papers and never received any financial compensation.

That's not an incentive, they're mocking you with money

You wouldn't download a car

TIL: In the PotC universe, The legs of the pier are noclip underwater.

There are literally tens of thousands of people in academia who could build a transparent, open-source, non-profit publishing system of their own.

Why don't they?

Internet memes come from the original concept of memes as an element of culture passed on from person to person.

From Wikipedia's "internet meme" article.