Right? The interaction cost is so high that it has to be a REALLY relevant article for you to suffer through it.

That's a great point. Part of that important feeling is pure cultural association. How the heck do you un-do something like that ingrained association?

This is an important study that can be extrapolated to the general inaccessibility of scientific literature. In grad school, I studied technical communication, where accessibility and readability are paramount. I questioned why the tech comm literature was not written in plain language and didn't follow any of the best practices we were learning. My prof and program lead said it's difficult to get away from the old practices basically because you want to be received well by the scientific/academic community. Jargon demonstrates rigorousity and knowledge of your field, etc. It's terrible.

Yeah there was a quote from Elsevier's CEO after that PR scandal a few years back about them trying to suppress open access (or control messaging around it...I forget). Anyway the part that hit me was a quote where the CEO was just like "Hey look, we're just trying to survive." Kind of hit home for me. As a psychologist I know how differently (and short-sighted) people act in survival mode. But after working with several publishers now, I'm can report that there are a few happy exceptions to this. American Geophysical Union is huge and they've been an absolute champion of moving to computational articles and stuff.