Yes, it seems right now the only thing holding back that change is researchers treating paid journals as prestigious and adding clout to their name and publishings, and lacking a system to engage in peer review outside of journals and conferences. ArXiv is basically halfway there to registering users and publishing, they just need features for registering as a peer review, engaging for a review, and judging as acceptable or not. Most of that could be covered by votes and comments like Lemmy but limited to an accredited community of peer researchers.

Edit: to be clear not all researchers, some reject paid journals just not enough to change behavior in the general field/branch yet