This was my immediate question. If the &quot;faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all for free&quot;, and then are forced to &quot;buy back the fruits of [their] labour at outrageous prices&quot;, why do academic institutions even bother paying money to these companies? If the refereeing is being done for free, naively it surprises me that universities haven&#x27;t just set up an independent organisation to do peer reviewing.