Copyrights
Mathematicians are stupid
The situation today: mathematicians write papers, referee papers,
are journal editors, and then later have to pay if they want to
look at their own papers or the papers of their colleagues.
How can this be? Well, because they are stupid.
They sign away their copyrights to commercial publishers.
Of course, if you first give something away, then afterwards
you no longer have it. Sad.
Make sure mathematics is accessible
If you publish something, make sure your colleagues can read it
without first paying a publisher. It is a good idea to have stuff
on your home page, and in a university repository, and on arXiv.
Perhaps you can think of other publicly accessible places.
It is not necessary to sign away copyrights.
Experience shows that one's papers also get published if one doesn't.
I regard it as unethical to sign away the rights to
research that was paid for by public money.
A form of corruption. Transferring public funds to your
private friends the publishers.
Journal policy
There are very simple things a managing editor who shares
this point of view can do. E.g., tell the author "Your paper was
accepted. We advise against signing away the copyrights."
A lot of good research has disappeared behind a paywall.
Since, for many potential readers, this research is effectively inaccessible,
there is something else editors of open access journals can do: they can
explicitly welcome papers that have little original content,
but re-treat, elegantly and with full references and credits,
important material that was hidden behind the paywall.
Promotion / tenure policy
Some journals tend to have high-quality papers, and sometimes bureaucrats
reward people for publications in journals that are advertised as being
high-quality. Now that we are in the process of moving away from all too
expensive journals, it is no longer appropriate to use this yardstick.
Quite the opposite: a publication in a closed-source journal
shows disregard for the mathematical community.
A better yardstick is to take only those publications into account
that can actually be accessed. It is the duty of committee members
to strongly protest against the use of journal ratings.