The first fact you need to deal with is that open access journals, started to explicitly counter the cost problem, have similar costs. If it was as simple as you think it is, open access journals would be much cheaper. (Arxiv is not peer reviewed, and does not count.)
The second point is that publishers costs are around 70% of revenue, as the article says margins are around 30%. That means there's a limit to how low they can go and not lose money, and I doubt many of those complaining would suddenly stop if prices were 30% lower.
> (Arxiv is not peer reviewed, and does not count.
Oh it does count. Peer reviews in journals are done by scientists for free. Peer review adds completely negligible costs (or even ZERO) to a journal. ArXiv is the perfect example.
They just increased the fees for their general purpose publication, PLOS ONE. Here's their reasoning:
"PLOS ONE has not increased its Article Processing Charge (APC) since 2009, for the past six years absorbing increasing publishing costs without raising author fees. Its new price reflects the work involved in shepherding the volume of papers PLOS manages from submission to published work; PLOS invests significant resources to improve the quality of PLOS ONE output, thoroughly checking for ethics, competing interests and robust science."
They also say they're updating their terrible article submission system. I don't see how any of this costs as much as it does. PLOS ONE alone publishes ~30,000 articles a year, that's a huge amount of money in fees, even if not everyone pays. On top of all of that, they accept and publish 70% of all articles. That's a really leaky sieve that shouldn't be so expensive to maintain.
I don't know why PLOS charges more. The point I'm trying to make is that - just because there's an OA journal out there which charges $100 per article; it doesn't mean that the costs are justified.
Do you have any compelling evidence that the costs for OA journals is one or two orders of magnitude less than everyone claims they are? (See e.g. http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-scie... which also shows a wide variety in publishing costs.)
I've yet to see any justification at all for the outrageous fees charged by academic journals.
The only costs I can see are printing/distribution and web hosting.
Typesetting is trivial. Editing is non-existent. Editorial isn't paid. Peer review isn't paid.
Having a nice office and marketing staff who hold university libraries to ransom shouldn't count as a cost.