I meant Science/Nature/Cell (the exact titles may differ in other fields, but that's how we roll in the life sciences), and no, you can't simply buy your way into these, they are already raking in money from their subscribers anyway. What is extremely common, unfortunately, is scientists exaggerating the meaning and importance of their results to make their manuscript appeal to journal editors, and everyone in the field has their own personal s##t list of high-profile articles that never should have been published, let alone in a prestige journal. Hell, many of the people on hiring committees will agree with me! And yet the hiring practices remain largely the same, year after year.

EDIT: just to be clear, the hiring committees I'm talking about tend to be nearly 100% academics (at least the ones I've seen). University faculty don't let the bean counters make important decisions like this.

That's fine. But that isn't what top tier means in the context of career advancement.

If by "corruption" you are implying some kind of quid-pro-quo, that's not how it works. Academia is both extremely decentralized and extremely competitive, and any department that prohibits publishing in non-OA journals is unilaterally disarming and will find hiring and retention very difficult. It's basically the Prisoner's Dilemma in action.

I would love to throw out the entire system and start from scratch (this is not an uncommon sentiment, especially among ex-academics who moved to industry), but the only way this happens is if the major funding agencies impose these decisions from the top down. And that is indeed how the most progress has been made, thanks to the NIH, HHMI, and so on.

As I explained in another comment in this thread, it is extremely unlikely that there is any quid-pro-quo exchange of money for favors by the journal publishers. I've heard plenty of third-hand rumors of star professors having an easy route into the prestige journals, but it's always because of a personal connection to an editor and/or exceptionally good reputation. I've never heard any rumors of money changing hands; the incentives are all wrong.

What I've seen actually happen is much pettier; without going into a ton of detail, it's full of perverse incentives and typical sloppy human psychology, even by exceptionally brilliant and otherwise admirable people. Academic communities also tend to be structurally very conservative and decentralized - thousands of tiny feudal lords working in loose collectives, aided by tens of thousands of low-paid apprentices. Organized change-from-within can be exceptionally difficult in this environment, especially since the apprentices are merely temporary workers, but also very smart and ambitious people who are difficult to replace quickly.

I'm basically paraphrasing the words of many more senior and successful former colleagues here, usually spoken in tones of despair or disgust. I suspect most would be happy if Congress simply passed a law forcing liberal OA policies for everything that federal money touches, because that's the money that really matters. So unfortunately we circle back to corruption, as the term normally applies to US politics: some rich person needs to start a crusade and spend millions of dollars competing with the publishing lobby. Everyone, right or left, should want their tax dollars to be spent more effectively than this.