academic journals now only provide a service to authors. they used to distribute… but the articles are available free on the arxiv, pubmed, authors websites, etc. the peer review and typesetting journals do is a joke and no author will pay for that.

the value journals have now is mainly to the author, because the prestige of getting accepted by the journal helps with the authors career. publishers figured out that authors will pay for this, so here we are … 🙄