In the early 2000s, before the Open Access initiative, Universities were in a situation where they paid for research projects AND for subscriptions to scholarly journals where the outcomes of that research were published.

Subscription prices had been increasing dramatically, although publishers did not pay the authors of the articles or the reviewers and, thanks to digitization, no longer had to incur the costs of printing and distribution.

In fact, even now, this is still the current situation with most for-a-fee publishers.

Open Access was born as an alternative to this publishing model.