If that's the case, my suspicion is this may continue happening until a 'Netflix of scientific papers' appears. Even with Sci-Hub down it's likely someone else will replicate it.
Every piece of value generating work in the chain of paper publication is done by people paid by universities and in turn by taxpayer money.
The publishing companies give 0 pay to the volunteers that write and peer review the papers. At most (and often even not that), they pay the person that does the final formatting (which is often already done by the author). So it often boils down to having a program add the publishers copyright notice.
So you pay 35$ per download of a 2mb file, where all the publisher did is host said 2mb file. Does that seem like a fair price?
So universities pay twice. The university library of my alma mater used to pay 15 Million Euros a year for online licenses.
That is three large multi-institutional EU projects worth of money, equivalent to 200 PhD student positions.
1. Academics write and submit papers -> university/tax money pays 2. Academics review papers -> university/tax money pays 3. Academics organize and attend conferences -> university/tax money pays 4. University buys published paper from publishers -> university/tax money pays
So university/tax money pays for writing the paper, quality assurance via reviews, conferences, just to finally buy the paper via some insanely expensive subscription.
For a rational environment like science this model is simply insane.
"Prestigious" is completely arbitrary and heavily lobbied for by the publishers.
Not all academics support it and several groups have opted out, publishing in open access only or organizing their own journals and conferences.
Historically, this model grew because the journal publishers provided the necessary infrastructure to print and distribute copies of the articles.
I am one person watching the world go by but I think that there was, is, far too much emphasis on things that can be counted.
People became afraid to make subjective judgements of quality. They demanded data. So whatever was the thing they counted, it got maximised. Quality is a slippery concept and it is harder than counting.
Judge scientists by the number of papers they publish, and they will publish a lot. A manifestation of the quantifying fetish.
It really seems like it's the inertia of existing administrators that haven't shifted away from judging papers based on the prestige of the journals they get published by.
Once the prestige factor goes away, and authors are judged primarily on the quality of their work, the publishers will lose their stranglehold.
Of course, that means a lot of entrenched interests losing revenue streams, so it's going to be a long struggle of grassroots change vs regulatory capture combined with reactionary pushback.
Having those journals owned by publishers that engage in rent-seeking behavior is.
On the contrary, because researchers are driven to publish publish publish, they often reheat the same paper over and over again with minor modifications, or just go conference shopping until they get an acceptance.
With less publishing pressure, qualitu would go up automatically.
Watson and Crick published papers only every couple years. This wouldn't work today at all.
Science needs to go back to publishing when you habe something to say, not just to fullfill your quota.