Publishing is how scientists get their street cred. Thus, the scientists themselves want to publish in big name journals to up their rep - hitting something like Nature is major coup. And then they can convert their standing in the big science gang to things like research grants, commercial projects, academic tenures, etc.

If you don't care about how science street cred works, nothing stops you from just throwing your papers up on arxiv. But then you get no publishing rep. And no visibility either. A big name journal in a given field gets eyes on your paper by default - but in the pits of arxiv, if you don't put your work out there yourself in the circles, no one will see it.

Arxiv is not p2p, is a preview of what will be published hopefully.

Then you had promising projects like Plos, but they sold themselves. They turned into a joke: open access and good IF, but high fees for the author, thus becoming a quick way to get a sub-par paper published "for the points" if your lab can pay the fee. Pay to win, using a gaming term. If you know you have a good paper, you publish on any other (closed) journal with similar IF but cheaper.

You're mixing metaphors. Academic prestige is like the complete opposite of "street cred".

What I dont understand is why cant we get free open journals with high curation standards that would eventually get to the reputation level of Nature.

Hosting pdfs + paying out reviewers could be covered by donations.