They only have "a hold on research" because academia wants it that way. There's no legal obligation for any research org to publish in journals. They do it voluntarily, for reasons that have nothing to do with furthering science. And despite this, instead of demanding an end to journal dominated academic research, we just complain about the cost.

Nobody wants to deal with the big pink elephant, so instead we argue about who's gonna pick up the turd it left in the living room.

Astronomy does better than a fair few of the physics subfields at arxiv usage (optics is especially bad from what I hear).