[earl_gray]

This was my immediate question. If the "faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all for free", and then are forced to "buy back the fruits of [their] labour at outrageous prices", why do academic institutions even bother paying money to these companies? If the refereeing is being done for free, naively it surprises me that universities haven't just set up an independent organisation to do peer reviewing.

[plafl]

Researchers don't pay for access to journals, universities do. There is a personal benefit for a researcher to publish on a prestigious but paywalled journal but no personal cost.

[VLM]

A good analogy is a farmer shopping at a supermarket.