[gallerytungsten]

It seems that the only thing keeping Elsevier and their ilk alive is the built-up reputation of the scientific journals that they have control over.

If academics got organized to the point of establishing new journals, with legit peer review, they could make all of the information free. Which it wants to be, right?

Obviously, there is the problem of establishing the credibility of these new "free journals," which is a serious obstacle for the reputation-based "publish or perish" pecking order of academia.

But once such a movement is established, it could eventually crush the paid journals and their rent-seeking profits. The captive journals would also eventually emancipate themselves and come around to this free information model.

Since such free journal articles would also be available on sites like Sci-Hub, the transition to (almost) totally free academic publishing could be unstoppable.

[uxp]

> It seems that the only thing keeping Elsevier and their ilk alive is the built-up reputation of the scientific journals that they have control over.

Isn't the reputation of those journals somewhat derived from the work that Elsevier puts into editing the papers that are submitted to them? I don't have enough knowledge to claim that it's a lot of work, nor that it costs them a lot to edit and review the submissions, but it's starting to sound like most of the arguments against Elsevier are completely ignoring the actual work they do.

"If we could find some way to do the work that makes the Science and Nature Journals desirable we could really change the world here. We already have the distribution portion figured out, so it shouldn't be hard!" I've got some really great ideas for an app, I just need a developer to implement it... etc.

Edit: I feel weird arguing for Elsevier. I personally would love to see all the paywalls and weird academic gateways that hide these fascinating nuggets of knowledge go away, but I have to play devil's advocate on this. Elsevier does do work, and that work is represented in the prestige that journals like Science exhibit.

[detaro]

Most of the review and editing isn't done by employees of the publisher, but by other scientists in the field. Sure, the main editors do important work coordinating the process and providing a point of contact, but they get a lot of value from unpaid work in the community. Which they then charge for access.

+ the status of a journal or conference is somewhat self-sustaining, since people want their papers in the best venues they'll submit more/better papers to the venues known as the good ones, which means those venues have a large pool of high-quality submissions to select from, which means they a) can boast high rejection rates and b) have great content, which means they are seen as high-quality, which ...

[nhaliday]

There have been some efforts along these lines in computer science and math:

http://theoryofcomputing.org/ (has some nice surveys if you're into theoretical computer science)

http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/ (the arXiv overlay model is interesting)

This is a bit apples to oranges—journals are not as central in CS as in biology or other older fields, and the norms about authorship and preprints tend to be more relaxed—but hopefully the trend will spread to more old-world sciences over time.

[T-A]

It's been tried. JHEP [1] started like that, as a journal by high energy physicists, for high energy physicists, online only, with infrastructure provided by SISSA. But after a few years, they turned it over to Springer.

[1] http://jhep.sissa.it/jhep/help/helpLoader.jsp?pgType=about