As one of the most prestigious journals around, or at least most well known generally, they should be using their clout to go in and bat for researchers, not constantly being reactive and defensive.
If all the journals wouldn't use their monopolies to extract money out of the system, there would be more money left in research. Academics are so dependent on publications it's ridiculous.
I agree that I would love to see that they solve the root problems and not the symptoms.
Honestly, I'd rather see most of the front matter of both journals disappear in favor of more room for scientific articles.
I hear there’s some sort of intertubes system to more efficiently disseminate papers for review & reading nowadays
https://www.ascb.org/newsletter/novemberdecember-2016-newsle...
Nature and Science are less bad than, say, many Elsevier imprints. In most cases I feel like Nature or its daughter journal genuinely improved the manuscripts we sent them, at least the ones they published (and some they did not!). But this is also true of eLife and Genome Research. NEJM is wonderful to work with as an author, but in retrospect I sometimes wonder if they were too nice to us (Stockholm syndrome?) and have had this thought about some well-regarded specialty journals. In such cases, it is hard for the news staff to justify reporting on the underbelly.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I had a paper last year in a journal with an impact factor of 15* that was accepted in 15 minutes. It took longer to sign the copyright transfer agreements than to "review" the work. (I have the timestamps on the emails to prove it, although I'm not going to do that because one of my coauthors is an editor.) There's just no way that peer review was adding any value in that case. And yes, it has already been cited by other groups.
* Yes, IF is a silly metric. But the parallel is just too good to pass up. One minute per point of impact, I suppose.