It's not just the publishing industry that is the problem. It is merely a symptom of the greater malaise in higher education as a whole. The focus is on degree

It's not just the publishing industry that is the problem. It is merely a symptom of the greater malaise in higher education as a whole. The focus is on degrees, not on true learning. So much of what occurs is in universities is total waste. But people put up with it to get the paper. As long as people keep blindly giving absurd sums of money to get the paper, these expensive publications will last. The answer is for people to wake up and value learning over a diploma. When that happens, then finally issues like this will go away. Heck, as a bunch of people have pointed out, many of these papers aren't even for real learning. They are worded in such a way as to make them sound smart to their peers, but unintelligible to the public.