To play devil's advocate, the value these prestigious journals provide is providing an objective function to optimize allocation of resources in academia. To advance one's career in academia, one needs to publish in prestigious journals, there isn't really a way around it (and if the entire system were to change, resources would need to be invested to create a different hierarchy of publication quality). To whatever extent publishing in prestigious journals captures scientific quality (and/or political astuteness), it serves the purpose of funneling more resources to those that optimize that objective. So it's not really a scam when everyone has run their individual game theory and chosen to continue with this particular system, and these journals can extract their cut because there is still value in publishing in Nature/Science/Annals or whatever. There is a push to change some of this but typically only the most successful academics can afford to boycott these journals, after already having dozens of publications vetted by the existing system.
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