So the main conclusions of the paper were not behind a paywall, just the full paper. And yet it still went unseen. Probably more because it was an old paper in a journal with a miniscule impact factor [1]. Even if it was open access, I really doubt that would have changed anything.
There are problems here, and I'm a huge open access supporter, but blaming this on a paywall seems like a red herring.
Yes, I'm an idiot. If you look in that paper I linked to, it shows the real impact factor is about 1. Which is still low, but not as crazy low as 0.122.
Also if you look up the original ebola paper there were actually several papers that cited it and discussed the results, and apparently nobody noticed those either.
There are problems here, and I'm a huge open access supporter, but blaming this on a paywall seems like a red herring.
[1] http://jis.sagepub.com/content/25/5/413.abstract says it is 0.122, which is really fucking low and basically means nobody reads it