http://bjoern.brembs.net/2019/03/how-publishers-keep-fooling-academics/
“This week, again, an academic publisher, SpringerNature, reaffirmed its readers that they have huge costs that necessitate the price they charge. This time, the publisher repeated their testimony from 2004 that “they have high internal costs” that amount to €10,000-30,000 per published article […].
If the scholarly community accepts this price as reasonable, it needs to be prepared to explain to the tax-payer, why it is justified to use public funds to pay a private company such as SpringerNature less than ~€500 to publish a scholarly article in one of their journals and then an additional ~€29,500 for cost items such as ineffectively rejecting articles, making sure the ‘published’ articles remain difficult to access for most ordinary tax payers and the salaries of the company’s executives and lobbyists.”