> It would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to. Not only is your personal assertion wrong, its complete lack of

> It would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to. Not only is your personal assertion wrong, its complete lack of understanding and awareness, coupled with the degree of arrogance and presumption, shows its patently and shockingly wrong. Without going into details, keep in mind that in academia there's this thing dubbed "publish or perish", and the only publishing that counts is the one being done in established publications with a history of high impact factor. The journals that count are specified by rules and regulations, which are often defined in legislation and comprised of a whitelist of established, often historical, and well-regarded journals. So unless your journal is already in the list and has a high impact factor, the whole world is pressured to not publish their A-game work in them. This leads to a feedback loop where incumbents are kept at the top of these metrics due to the fact that they are the only one that can receive works that count, and conversely no one who seeks to finish a PhD or secure tenure or get funding will waste their hard work on publications that do not count. Then there are other factors, like prestige. Everyone wishes to be invited to be a reviewer of, say, Nature, but no one wants wo waste their time reviewing publications to Bob's journal. It takes far more to put together a journal than a 5$/month instance in the cloud and an afternoon hacking WordPress.