I really do suggest you read Peter Suber's book, because it addresses many of these complaint. Keep in mind that Nature's costs are an outlier and Nature is one of the most intransigent players when it comes to OA.
Regarding rights, moving towards OA actually protects certain rights. Traditionally, publishers required that you assigned copyright of your work to them. This meant that you couldn't substantively reuse your own articles in, say, your dissertation. One of the plank's of MIT's framework is that "No author will be required to relinquish copyright, but instead will be provided with options that enable publication while also providing authors with generous reuse rights." This of course is only copyright. Open access says nothing about patents or profiting from your research. While it is certainly true that university's have an issue of properly attributing such rights to students, it is a separate issue from OA. We are already publishing articles. It's part of the academic game. OA is just about making sure that it's not jut those with lots of money who can read them. The patents and tech are still all yours (or your PI's or universities or whatever).
Regarding costs of publishing, there are two main issues. One is that the prices that commercial publishers in particular charge is way out of line with their costs. As paper journals have gone away, prices of online only journals have soared (and resultant profits, way outpacing inflation. Elsevier's profit margin is ~40%. I don't know if you are familiar with other industries, but that is *very* high. Beyond that though, there are a variety of OA models that do work for covering costs and whatnot. You yourself cited PNAS, which makes it work. Preprint services like arXiv also make it work (though without peer review, obviously). Your cited op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education is mostly focusing on smaller professional societies which I already pointed out as a legitimate critique earlier in this thread and suggested potential alternatives. All of this is say that it can work.
Regarding why we we haven't moved already, that's a combination of factors. One is that academia, despite its political leanings, is a very conservative institution that is slow to change. Another is where the economic incentives are aligned. If professors had to pay journal subscription fees out of their own funding pools, you can be sure that they would be howling for OA or at least dramatically reduced costs. But they don't pay themselves. It's the university library that negotiates contracts and pays for it out of the general budget. And whenever you have someone other than the user paying for the product, incentives get misaligned and costs can grow.
A final reason is the FUD spread by publisher and outright bribes. If you haven't read
Richard Feynman's essay about his experiences with the textbook industry, I really recommend it. I can confirm that academic publishers do much of the same thing in terms of offering free swag, free trips to Hawaii, etc., to the editors of notable journals. You don't have to convince the whole field to stay put if you can convince the editors, after all. The publishers like to talk about the end of peer review and all the is good and holy about academic publishing. But peer review works with OA, it has been doing so for quite some time. After all, peer reviewers and editors aren't paid under the current system. Journals can transition or be replaced gradually over time. Or we could set up a flag system on a place like arXiv to indicate what things have been peer reviewed by what organization. There are plenty of models.
We aren't talking pie-in-the-sky here.
most of Europe is well on the way to doing this./a>