The irony is that European universities are one of the reasons we are stuck with the journal publishing model. I have spoken with tenured professors about this, and in general European universities are more concerned with the name of the journal publishing company that publishes the articles a professor has published for things like hiring and granting tenure. The attitude at European schools seems to be that there is a group of companies responsible for maintaining high-quality journals, and that publishing in journals not operated by the incumbents is questionable. As a result, researchers have trouble pursuing alternative publishing models e.g. running journals over the Internet without the likes of Springer/Elsevier/etc.

(My own experience is that American schools are too fixated on the names of the journals, but less concerned with the company that publishes the journal. So it would still be pretty tough to break the current model, although not as difficult as it would be with Europe.)

Even those who have licensed access to journals thank goodness for Sci-Hub, at least I do. It is often much easier to feed Sci-Hub a DOI and get the paper after negotiating a simple CAPTCHA than it is to log in through some portal so a cookie gets set which tells Wiley that this user has access to these, but not those journals today (but maybe tomorrow, or not), use their search feature to find the correct volume and then finally find the link which hopefully shows an open lock.

In this it is comparable to those copy protection schemes of old which made paying users jump through hoops while the pirates just had smooth sailing all the way. Arrrrrr!