what is this in reference to?

there are plenty of low cost open access journals run by nonprofits and professional societies. however junior researchers when building their reputation try and publish in journals that are as prestigious as possible, without worrying about cost, apc, open access etc.

iwriting reviews is time consuming, unpaid, and doesn't help the reviewers career. so it takes a while because reviewers are already busy and don't prioritize writing reviews too much.

quality of the reviews is questionable. 10% of the reviews are through and provide valuable feedback. the remaining 90% are cursory "yeah this is interesting, publish it" or "not interesting/outside scope".

very very few reviews find and report scientific errors

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 ... 🙄

so back in the day we needed publishers for distribution. now with the Internet, distribution is easy. but prices only went up

associate editors and referees are unpaid volunteers. typesetting is also mainly done by the authors. but prices are high because the publisher wants to profit.

there are quite a few high quality journals that are fairly priced and published by non profit publishers. these are the only journals authors should publish in ....