> But the insistence of smart people to use them as such, when (trust me here) they have heard arguments against that practice myriad times, points at the fact

> But the insistence of smart people to use them as such, when (trust me here) they have heard arguments against that practice myriad times, points at the fact that such proxies are needed, and that none better have yet emerged. No. It points to a coordination/collective action problem. Everyone knows that they should switch away from Elsevier, and if everyone did, we'd be better off, but every single author, by switching, would incur only the costs, and no benefits. Your argument above neglects this. It is tempting to say that the status quo is optimal, because otherwise it would not be the status quo, but it doesn't fly here. And I find Elsevier etc. above-market returns on equity, and capturing more than 1% of public science expenditure, without adding much, quite scandalous. EDIT to add: Sometimes, the coordination problem can be solved. For example, in 2003, nestor of CS Don Knuth managed to pull everyone from Elsevier's Journal of Algorithms over to a new journal, after writing a bitter letter complaining about their pricing: > In 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth. The Journal of Algorithms continued under Elsevier with a new editorial board until October 2009, when it was discontinued. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editorial_boards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor... https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf