I mean, I'm coming at this from the perspective of a freelance journalist where sometimes the best rate I can get for a story that took three months to research is $250. Not talking just interviews and finding expert sourcing, but deeply involved work with code, data analysis, data cleanup, etc etc etc, often that nobody else is doing. So, that's pretty fucking good in my book, man.
It sounds like you have this backwards. Imagine getting paid $250 for an article and then having to pay $11k out of your own pocket so anyone can actually read it.
Like the rest of the comments say, this is a fee that the authors pay to publish, not a commission that is paid to the authors.
You seem to have misunderstood. The authors don't get paid anything for publishing. Nature typically puts papers behind a paywall. Nature will make a paper available for free if the authors pay Nature ~11k.
It's like ransomware for research
Send 0.6875 BTC to address 188bBz5TPXNC46wVWhkA5ZDqSQBM4EqK8u to unlock this federally-funded research paper or it will be deleted in 195.4 hours.