[hyperbovine]

Elsevier own some really high profile journals, including The Lancet and Cell. Refusing to publish in these journals, or similar ones in terms of impact factor, is simply not an option for junior faculty in most departments. I have friends for whom "publishing in Nature, Science and/or Cell" is literally a precondition for getting tenure.

[Chinjut]

Why does academia put up with this stupid system? Academics are already the ones doing all the peer review on their own, free of payment, right? So why not say "Hey, we'll set up our own servers, host papers free for all to access, and then note which ones pass the same levels of scrutiny we'd apply as reviewers were we reviewing them for Nature, Science, Cell, The Lancet, whatever"?

Doesn't seem like the journals actually provide much beyond asking professors to do stuff for free, both in terms of writing papers and reviewing them. Is inertia really worth letting them leech so much money and lock down access (antithetical to the whole idea of public-ation...) while they're at it?

[jccalhoun]

It reminds me of the electoral college system: people complain about it and realize it is outmoded system but it will never get replaced because the people with the power to actually change it won't since the system got them the power in the first place. Academic publishing isn't quite that bad since it is slowly changing but I think it is similar.

Established faculty largely don't care because they are established (there are exceptions of course). Some new faculty would like to change it but if they do set up their own system it won't be taken seriously by the administration or senior faculty in charge of tenure review. There are also new faculty who don't know or care about these things so they just do what they know which is traditional publishing.

I was at a faculty development session a couple months ago. There were 20 faculty members there from various departments and the topic turned to open access journals. Some people were arguing that they weren't worth publishing in because tenure review boards haven't heard of them so they don't take them seriously. Then one guy - remember, this is a college professor - asked "where are these papers stored?" He wanted to know where the actual servers were physically located. And then he said, "This whole online thing seems like Big Brother."

That being said, things are changing and in some fields open access journals are seen as reputable and accepted but they are still new and in some fields (non-stem mostly) they are seen much more skeptically. So if you are in those fields and you want tenure you are going to try to get published in the old journals first.

[KMag]

The Electoral College still offers a modicum of protection against the tyranny of the masses. In a pure popular vote system, presidential candidates wouldn't have to educate themselves enough to pretend to care about the lives outside the US's 10 largest cities.

[gohrt]

Because most of leading academics were happy with the system and don't care about open access. This is slowly changing as the Internet generation takes over.

[chris_wot]

Is tenure still as widely available as it once was?

But yes, entrenched interests hold everyone back eventually. They are currently being disrupted, and this time they lost the battle completely - there is not a single thing they can do to effectively keep their entrenched interests from crumbling.