The NIH indeed requires all work published under their grants to be made available open-access. Problem is publishers figured out that meant they could charge EVEN MORE for submissions to be made open access than they charged for standard closed publishing. Wiley charged me $2,975 last year for an accepted submission to Human Brain Mapping.
And why did you pay if i may ask? I would guess it's because if you don't your career will be in trouble because that's what employers value.
The current state of affair isn't a random thing. It's because the global policy of employment in public research and the definition of success is completely stupid and based on metrics (i don't care which metrics, the sole fact that we try to quantify everything just makes this kind of situations possible).
Publish or perish my friend, you've hit the nail on the head. There is not currently a widely accepted avenue for free open publication in neuroscience because the preprint system (and its lack of peer review) are distrusted, and the A-tier journals know their status and can set their prices based on demand. I, on the other hand, am effectively required to show a regular pattern of publishing in A- and B-tier journals to even be considered competitive for a potential tenure-track position, let alone land one and earn tenure.
This is a major reason I am evaluating alternative career options.
They probably paid because, as the grandparent post suggested, taking public funds from NIH imposes a requirement to publish the research results in this manner, so for the research team it's an unavoidable part of the expenses related to the grant - and so it's not the researchers' money nor their decision; NIH defined what they want and so they're paying publishers a significant portion of their funding for that.
Indeed, most likely the question of paying or not wasn't even asked properly and this is just the norm.. In any case my point is that the problem of this capture from some scientific publishers is much deeper than just a problem of how publishing is setup. Its one of the many symptoms of how current research institutions are governed.
