| > Does anyone have any insight as to how this happened? Somehow the publishers have attained monopoly-level profits. Apparently they keep raising the prices and the customers can't do anything about it? This happens because of historical lock-in. When you get evaluated as a researcher, the most important part of your curriculum are your publications. There are two things that matter about them: 1. Where are they published. There are rankings (done by the publishers) of the publications in each scientific area. For really important stuff, only papers published in Q1 (quartile one) publications matter. 2. How many citations they've got. Since there's so many garbage, people tend to cite other papers from well-known publications (nobody is going to question a claim you cite from a paper in a well-established journal, whereas if you cite a paper from a random unknown journal you'll have a harder time passing review). As you can see, the path of least resistance to advance your own career as a researcher is to publish in the journals by the famous publishers. This also means they get the best papers, and the whole thing perpetuates itself. > So I guess "published in journal X" rather than "published in arXiV" is another brand. There's brand, but there's also process. A paper published in Nature has passed a number of filters and reviews that a paper published in arXiv hasn't. That's not a 100% guarantee (there are garbage papers in Nature and excellent ones in arXiv), but the average quality is much much much better in Nature. |