Comment 3 by TickleFour :

I do wonder how much it actually costs to produce the scientific journals in which we publish our research. Graduate students and faculty prepare the manuscripts for publication, then faculty volunteer their time for the peer review process. ... It seems to me that the publishers are making a hefty profit.

Should faculty be the ones to pay for open access to their own research?

You forgot to mention the hefty charges we have to pay to the journals to publish our papers (for people who don't publish papers, the charges are usually well over $1,000 and sometimes over $2,000).

I can understand paying fees to open access journals that don't get subscription revenue, but I don't like the idea of paying Oxford or Elsevier a hefty fee for the privilege of handing over the copyright to my work, after which the journal hides it behind a paywall. Not to mention that they'll come back in a few months and ask me to review papers for free! I decided last year that it's better to publish in open-access journals.

I understand that the journals are businesses, but sometimes a business model gets outdated and no longer works. Hopefully, this is the case with for-profit journals --- especially the ones that charge $40,000 a year for university subscription fees. The article I linked says that two publishers bundle journals into one subscription. This approach reminds me of cable TV companies that force you to subscribe to 87 channels, even though you'll only ever watch four of them!

Here's some information from 2004 about journal costs. I expect that the situation is worse now.