Put more favourably, the purpose of an open access journal is to arrange a critical evaluation of my stuff and to point other researchers to it (curation). To justify paying for this, I think of it like hiring a consultancy and, later, a marketing firm for my research.
Perhaps in a better world, we would disentangle the review and the curation aspects -- I'd pay for the arrangement of peer review of my article, upload it freely to the arxive, and pay separately for unbiased, curated lists of noteworthy articles in my field.
Perhaps in a better world, we would disentangle the review and the curation aspects -- I'd pay for the arrangement of peer review of my article, upload it freely to the arxive, and pay separately for unbiased, curated lists of noteworthy articles in my field.