zlacker

>>sixtyf+(OP)
The core issue is that journals offer standard. People don't like to bother with checking every paper's reputability with a magnifying glass, and the reputation of the journal gives a shortcut around that. It's editorial work which gives the competitive edge.

Now, of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations. However, once you have achieved a reputable status with your journal, it becomes something that can be milked for money. And generally people fail to resist that temptation.

Even if they resisted, they still have the entire academic publishing industry very scared, and as we can see, these are people who aren't afraid to use the dirtiest tactics to protect their position.

Even though the status quo is strong, it can be dismantled.

>>mach1n+Jt
The existence of many high quality open access journals would seem to contradict your theory.

>>OskarS+ju
These are in an extreme minority, although this may vary from discipline to discipline. In my area you can count fully open access journals on one hand and they play no notable role yet. All top journals are closed access with expensive "open access" publication fees (ca. 3,000 USD per article). Most of them are Springer and Oxford Journals, others are Elsevier.

>>jonath+gw
Can I guess, your area is experimental science/engineering? I notice that in the more theoretical fields (theoretical physics,math,CS,stats) the open access channels are on par with the paywalled ones. Curious as to why. Perhaps its more expensive to replicate results, perhaps the fees are nothing compared to what you pay for the labour and equipment..

>>balsam+kx
No, it's philosophy. I believe theoretical physics and math are special, as you recognize, because they need a lot of additional vetting. My work is mostly in formal philosophy, which does involve a bit of math, and I'm constantly worried the reviewers might not spot a mistake and send it to colleagues for additional checking. This must be a hundred times more pressing in math and physics, so they developed open archives. As for CS, the reason for more open access archives may be a bit different. My personal impression from reading many CS papers is that 90% of publications are garbage whose only purpose is to satisfy some publication requirements. There is also a lot of repetition by authors. That's in my view understandable since many funding authorities also expect fancy prototype systems and concrete implementations, and computer scientists have only 7 days a week to achieve all this. So in CS hurdles for publication are kept low by having a lot of proceedings and open access journals and archives.

>>jonath+my
Physics PhD here, I would extend your comment that 90% of CS papers are garbage to include engineering and physics as well. The vast majority of those are what people refer to as "status updates" where long term projects provide minor updates that don't really contribute anything to the general knowledge but exist solely to advertise their work and provide a bullet point in their quarterly report to the funding agency. This is also added to the fact that most PhD programs require a candidate to publish at least 3 articles in peer-reviewed journals, where some programs even discriminate based on the impact factor, further entrenching the paid-for journals as open access are not ranked as highly. I personally really like the IEEE journals as they are cheap ("free" with IEEE membership to a given society) and reasonable high quality (exceptions as always of course). Years ago I looked at trying to get my department a subscription to the major Elsevier journal in our industry and was quoted almost $6,000/yr, mostly for historic papers published back in the 50's, 60's and 70's where authors were long since dead and the utility mostly on filling in gaps in modern theory. While neither bandwidth nor website design infrastructure are free, high access costs are unnecessary and just equate to greed IMHO.