No, academics who volunteer to review and edit are the stewards. The free journals have a cheap website and do all the work by email and some LAMP stack (EDIT:) maintained by a classified staff programmer to the tune of 25% FTE -- this is CHEAP, and the expensive part (the profs) do the work for free.
The non-free journals don't do shit except charge rent for their reputation, and print paper copies -- the free journals don't have the prestige as the non-free journals, so count less for your career. I am thinking in my field that Demography and Policy and Development Review lead to tenure, but Demographic Research doesn't lead to shit. This is changing, but not fast enough.
Academics have no means of evaluating their peers other than articles in prestigious journals. They don't make anything that anyone wants to buy, and really no one outside of your subfield of like 100 people will ever read you anyway (100 if you are lucky...) Popular popularity is actually a mark against you, so you will never be measured by sheer number of readers.
The system is slowly "unwarping" itself, at least in Europe. The big universities are slowly publishing all the articles they produce. For example, DTU in Denmark:
http://orbit.dtu.dk/app (not all the articles are available as pdf, the policy to have them as pdf too is slowly applied).
Also, as a researcher, when somebody is asking you for your paper, just send it. In all the cases I really needed a paper and was unable to get it for free, I contacted the author and got it. Even better, it makes you in contact with the author and can lead to collaboration down the line. Old school networking with groups and circles, it works very well...
The non-free journals don't do shit except charge rent for their reputation, and print paper copies -- the free journals don't have the prestige as the non-free journals, so count less for your career. I am thinking in my field that Demography and Policy and Development Review lead to tenure, but Demographic Research doesn't lead to shit. This is changing, but not fast enough.
Academics have no means of evaluating their peers other than articles in prestigious journals. They don't make anything that anyone wants to buy, and really no one outside of your subfield of like 100 people will ever read you anyway (100 if you are lucky...) Popular popularity is actually a mark against you, so you will never be measured by sheer number of readers.
(It's a warped system.)