The choice of publication venue is driven by prestige. Researchers want to publish in “high impact,” high visibility venues. In many fields those are closed jo

The choice of publication venue is driven by prestige. Researchers want to publish in “high impact,” high visibility venues. In many fields those are closed journals, but if those journals magically disappeared the research community would probably just take a bit to figure out a new pecking order, and in that sense nothing would change. JMLR is an interesting example, where the editorial board of a top journal in the machine learning field basically forked the journal to an open alternative, and of course nobody hesitated to publish there because that’s where the prestige was. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Research#History https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_...