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I'm sorry I'm having a hard time extracting a summary/thesis out of your comment. You seem to trying to explain why it hasn't happened to journals before. The

• dredmorbius 9y ago
  No, most of that was my trying to explain how I'm concieving of monopoly-tending industries and firms -- what characteristics they have. Somewhat inchoate, I'm well aware, though attempts to describe this may help me in formulating the concepts, if not you. I'd not addressed why journals haven't already been disrupted. I did suggest how they might become disrupted, borrowing on the model of MySpace/Facebook. See also: Newspapers/radio, cinema/television, and radio/television. It's not that the old networks fail, per se, but a new network (that is, monopoly), which delivers on the same need (or want), and does so in ways which bypass the original. But since you raise the question of why journals haven't been disrupted, part of the point is that they'd emerged as a blocking / gatekeeping mechanism only fairly recently. Peer-review is largely a post-1970 phenomenon, and really largely since 1980. I'm not entirely sure when journal subscription costs became an issue, though I do recall hearing buzzes about it in the 1980s. The emergence of the Web as an alternate distribution mechanism was already suggesting academic journals were obsolete by the late 1990s, and I was part of early Open Access discussions at the time. I basically see that solution still developing, which suggests there simply hasn't been sufficient time. Sci-Hub is doing a great deal on the time-sufficiency department.