The publication fees are related to prestige and readership. Authors are interested in the relative number of citations that their paper is likely to receive in a given journal. Authors with larger research budgets may be willing to pay more to attract additional citations.

http://www.eigenfactor.org/openaccess/

In my opinion, we shouldn't be paying for publication in the first place. However, journals seems more commercialised these days and we don't have much choice. In this vein, I rather pay for a Scopus or ISI publication instead of a peer reviewed one as it'll be value for money.

Not just these days, Journals or rather publishing has always been commercial. The academic sense went out the window when the publication fees were introduced and major databases started taking leading journals on there database. I am searching for a suitable journal that is meeting the following criteria (1) Authentic Journal, (2) Not Stand Alone unless it is affiliated with a Business Institute (3) No Publication fee (4) Submission to Online available time the least ... I have found many publishing houses that have authentic ISSN numbers and also the articles have a proper DOI and as well as appear on Google Scholar. The problem I am having is that many predatory journals are available online and even they add stickers on there website that they are such and such impact factor as well as SSCI/SCI etc ... don't we have any international body watchdog to monitor and put down any such website. As many international journals are offering paid publication to authors but they are stand alone. In a funny case I found a journal where the Editor in Chief himself was a PhD Research Student....

Many journal operators experience difficulties to sustain the journal operations in terms of the increased costs and in getting reviewers that can accomplish the reviewing tasks within short period of time. Understanding today's time and workload regime for academicians (as reviewers), the reviewing process will take a long time and most of reviewers will refuse to review papers due to other priorities. Many journal editors will reward reviewers financially to appreciate time spend in reviewing papers. To me, publication fees is okay and fine to cover the cost of journal operation, provided not to sacrifice the quality of the journal just for the sake of getting money from all sort of low quality of papers.

Some good journals (high impact) will have different reasons to collect publication fees. Among the reasons is the so-called public access versus restricted access of published article. If the authors pay the fee, the journal will make the paper free access (download) to public, but the journal gives another option (without fee) then the paper will be put under 'restricted access', meaning readers need to pay to the journal to download the paper.

I think there are two sides of this. Yes, there are some journals that require fees they requested. But it is also observable that there are many journals just ask huge amount of money and publish low quality papers. The later is considerably damaging the research academia.