In my view a free market cant include massive asymmetries of power between actors. Individual authors face large costs for not playing the game, and Elsevier and others have used their market power to do everything they can to perpetuate a stupid system of intellectual snobbery that keeps them incumbent. Authors are in small part to blame, but mostly they are the victims.
Most real problems in the world are coordination problems, where one motivated/coordinated entity sits on an essential “toll bridge”, and the whole world can theoretically just coordinate to route around them. But because “everyone else in the world” is a huge number of people with their own mixed up set of incentives, and the solution doesn’t work unless a critical mass coordinates to do the same thing, this turns out to be really hard.
> They don't need to work with any formal publisher. LaTeX and the Internet make it easier than ever. Nobody needs any of the publishers to get their work out.
That's not how academia works, though. It would be great if it did, but it doesn't.
Any grad student--who does the grunt work in academia--will tell you they would not be allowed to put up their research online without their lab's permission. And grad students sign a form that anything they say and write is owned as IP by university anyways.
Please look into how the academic sausage is made before spouting more misinformation as well as specious takes on spherical-cow free market theories. Your comments are all over this thread and I can't mentally unread them.
No, they don't. Not unless you want to sabotage your own career.
There is a limited set of journals for a specific area of science, and you need to publish in the most reputable journal possible. There is only a very limited choice here in most cases.
So you're confirming that somehow the best publishers somehow manage to provide something of value. The people judging your career are the ones you're complaining about and somehow they're choosing to respect a few publishers.
Instead of just imagining that Elsevier is somehow bad, you might ask yourself why these committees respect their journals so much. What are they doing that's right?
Do you imagine the suits in Amsterdam are actually responsible for the quality of any given Elsevier journal? Most of the genuinely prestigious titles they publish were acquisitions. It is as clear an example of rent seeking as anyone can come up with.
Most authors are rated based on the journals they publish in, and the most prestigious journals are typically from predatory publishers (Elsevier, Nature etc., yes I know that predatory journal is typically used in other context).
This is simply not true. Funding agencies, revieweds and universities incentivize the researchers to publish in "high-impact" journals.
If researchers weren't pushed by institutions to publish more and more and in highly ranked journals things would be much better.
The problem is nobody wants to do the move (researchers, institutions, funding agencies), so publishers (Elsevier isn't alone, ACS, Springer, Wiley, they all do that) increase the prices as much as they can because nothing happened when they did. And even now, as was shown by a comment above only a tiny percentage of their clients take action...
> They choose the journals because if they don't, their career doesn't advance.
Is this basically saying that publishing in non-big-journals (e.g. ArXiV) doesn't really "count" as citations? If so, then that's probably the right language to use here - that citations are a currency that only big (expensive, monopolistic) publishers can actually pay for papers in.
You misspelled oligopoly. My guess from your comment is that you don't have a handle on how academia works, which is perfectly fine. You don't have to. But then don't hold such strong opinions because what you wrote is not even wrong.
