I don’t understand where the need arises to both charge for access to journals and charge for submission to journals. It’s insane, and I think the reason that the scientific community has put up with it for so long is a combination of the factor you mentioned — that people are caught up in the prestige of high impact-factor journals — and the fact that scientists are notoriously difficult to stir to action. In my (admittedly miniscule) experience, most people understand the horrific state of scientific publishing, but many simply could not be bothered to do anything about it. They’re happy to just do their research and try to publish it in the right journal and participate in the system and then fret about how scarce grant money is these days.

Open Access journals simply have to be the future of scientific publishing. The fact that academic publishing is still a viable industry is purely an artefact of history. At this point, it really should be a lost cause for corporations, not a huge cash cow. If nothing else, limiting access to the literature is unscientific because it prevents us from properly accounting for all available evidence.

We call the arbiters of fraudulent journals “predatory publishers.” But the horrifically exploitative business model of Elsevier (and Wiley and Nature, for that matter) is almost as bad. If only academia had the collective strength to do something about it.