For the first time, Nature family journals set their open access price, and it is around £9000. No, that's not a typo. Science is increasingly just a capitalist endeavour, where irrespective of your ideas, only those who get all the money can succeed. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02959-1

And increasingly in science, a small number of researchers do get all the money, and can build networks and infrastructure that helps them maintain that, while others deliver all of the teaching & admin, and have to make do with very little.

I totally understand where £9000 comes from. The Nature model is to solicit vast numbers of submissions and reject almost all, publishing very few papers. With so few published articles, pricing has to be high to cover costs. What it really shows is that model is bankrupt.

To put the sum of £9000 into context, a final year undergraduate student in my lab may get £500 to spend on their science, a typical PhD student may (if lucky) get £2500, a funded postdoc may get around £12,000. That money has to pay for doing the science.

Of course, extra money flows from research councils to pay for open access publishing. But who does it flow to? Mostly those groups that already have big research budgets. And the more that flows, then the even less funding there is for us little people to do science.