It still blows my mind that people claim this is true. Almost all CS papers are on the author's website, eprint, arxiv, etc. Google scholar even links to them.

Don't get be wrong, closed publications are a travesty. But they are a travesty because institutions pay out of government grant money (indirectly via overhead) to pay for subscriptions and because it's government funded research. They are not, at least in anything approaching the average case, a travesty because researchers cannot access results.