On dealing with high prices of academic journals

After a high profile mathematician got the ball rolling again (and he does not pull his punches ["The journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals is a notorious example of a journal that is regarded as a joke by many mathematicians, but which libraries all round the world must nevertheless subscribe to"]!), our friends at Crooked Timber are calling for a boycott of Elsevier journals because of its pricing practices. This is an issue we return to regularly at NewAPPS (here and here). This call to action will probably fail, too, because as we learned in the Synthese debacle (a Springer journal) and from the rigged ESF rankings (again, involving Springer journals) too many powerful academics benefit from the status quo. (I have named names on these issues, but this is not just a European problem.) Given the the way academics are evaluated and advanced, it pays to "capture" an established journal for one's intellectual niche(s) come what may. I predict: we will only see a change if the influential folk that protect the status quo are bribed in the right way, oops, I mean brought along in advance.