Then what’s stopping very very busy scientists from submitting to open access and “less prestigious” journals? Those journals exist today.

I’m not saying the onus is on scientists to fix the entire issue but the progress has to start by committees that hire and promote people in academia and to stop looking at publications in prestigious journals as a marker of career progression and differentiation.

What stops us is that many Universities and departments only count certain journals/conferences as “prestigious” and make both hiring and promotion decisions based on the number of publications in these venues. Even if you’re senior enough not to care about promotions, you will always have students and junior collaborators who need to run this gauntlet.

And more to the point, these prestigious conferences and journals often get the best researchers in the field to peer-review for them, because doing that work (for a prestigious venue) also holds some value in the promotion/hiring process. People like to dump on peer review, scientists more than most, but in retrospect many (some) of my papers have improved through the process of getting those people to sign off on the work.

I fully agree with you.

viewership. Publishing in a small journal collectively carries risk of not being seen, or assumed that its in the no-name journal because its crap.

That's why these editors move is a good one. Collective action protects individuals. To support them, I've already signed up to serve as a reviewer.

That’s a good point. I hadn’t considered that before.