It's a coordination problem. A journal is valuable because having a publication in it confers prestige and impact, which scientists need for jobs and tenure. N

It's a coordination problem. A journal is valuable because having a publication in it confers prestige and impact, which scientists need for jobs and tenure. Now, if all scientists in a field were to switch to a new journal, they could take the prestige with them, get rid of the rent seeking publisher, and have the same science, prestige, and impact for a fraction of the cost. But if any individual scientists switches, they'd carry the full loss (of foregoing prestige/impact), while achieving no gain. So, you need to have everybody on board simultaneously. A switch like that can happen [1], but it happens rarely. Often it takes the nestor of a field to get sufficiently pissed off with a journal and persuade everyone to move on. Great example: Don Knuth in 2003 convinced the Editorial Board of the Journal of Algorithms (which he had founded) to resign [2], and start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower-priced, not-for-profit publisher. Elsevier kept the old Journal going, but gave up and folded 6 years later. Yay. Wish that would happen more often. But given that the situation was basically the same 20 years ago, I am not optimistic. What needs to happen to shake the scientific publishing world up?? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editorial_boards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor... [2] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf