[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.