I fully agree. The US's academic system provides a lot of insulation to researchers because generally this publishing cost will be paid for by your employing company, by your university, or by a grant. So researchers are not incentivized to spend a ton of time worrying about it. At the same time, I believe the large majority of researchers don't realize how little (or negative, arguably) value they receive from paying for publication vs doing so for free (such as on arxiv).
Specifically, online academic publishing is, at its core, indexing and hosting pdf files. It is some work to do a good job. But it's also quite achievable to re-create the same service without asking for much, if anything, from authors. Given a little funding, every field could use arxiv or their version of arxiv (which is free to publish on). The bottleneck to a large-scale change is the self-sustaining prestige of a paid journal's badge.
As a first step, we can spread awareness among authors of how crazy it is to pay so much to publish.
Specifically, online academic publishing is, at its core, indexing and hosting pdf files. It is some work to do a good job. But it's also quite achievable to re-create the same service without asking for much, if anything, from authors. Given a little funding, every field could use arxiv or their version of arxiv (which is free to publish on). The bottleneck to a large-scale change is the self-sustaining prestige of a paid journal's badge.
As a first step, we can spread awareness among authors of how crazy it is to pay so much to publish.