Context (for those who might not be in academia): many academic publishing companies (like Elsevier) charge exorbitant prices for researchers to get their papers published as open access. Meanwhile, none of these researchers actually get anything in return for it (except for major street cred if their papers get highly cited)
It’s pretty impressive that they managed to trick a whole field of the smartest people into doing it too. What kind of crazy con artist thought this up? Lol