In my experience as a mathematician, most for profit journal publishing companies are essentially rentiers making money off a captive clientele, who don't even get much utility any more from them, except for access to some older articles. Moreover, the services they provide to authors are also usually worse than the non-profit journals: no copy editing, crappy editorial tools, just a complete disregard for the actual producers of the (free) content they make money off. It's a complete and unmitigated scam.
It's critical to realise that the main role journals play among active, tenure-track academics is in restricting upward professional growth.
If you must publish in high-impact journals, and those journals are closed-access, then you must publish in closed-access journals.
Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not change. The rentiership is actually on the professional advancement track.
Corollary: it is only necessary for journals to retain the tenure committees on their side in order to keep their money-printing operation running.
> Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not change.
Couldn't the top tier of Post-docs also make this happen? If they simply refuse to publish in the top tier journals, the departments who are competing for them will have to either relax their publishing requirements or take a 2nd tier candidate.
This only works if a truly top tier candidate who can continue to work without limitation in a Post-docs position. I.e. someone with the research equivalent of "fuck-you money". But it doesn't have to be all of them. When a 2nd tier institution can just make an administrative change and basically get a free 1st round draft pick, there's going to be institutions that take the deal. It doesn't even really hurt the scholar, because they really don't need to be at Yale, they can be successful anywhere with strong students and plenty of money.
It's a classic collective decision problem. If almost all postdocs at the same time decided to boycott closed journals, then this would work. However, in practice solutions are always failing whenever they are based on the idea that a majority has to voluntarily make the right move within a short time period, if that means smaller wins for people who do not make the move.
To give another example of such a problem: If in urban areas everyone switched his WIFI router to some open mesh network software at the same time, the gains from this ad hoc network would be tremendous. But if only few switch, the gains are almost nonexistent and the losses can be high. So it's never going to happen.
And maybe they pledge by providing a paper they're withholding from publishing? If the authors, pledging platform, and open journals collaboratively design & coordinate a process for handling the reviewing of said papers, then the process can safely be automated. Also, pledging can be done as a pledge to be available for free peer review if they aren't pledging a paper.
Tenure-track academia is an exercise in restricting upward professional growth, anyway. It's built into the system.
When you've chosen the tenure track, you know you might be spending a decade at a school nobody has ever heard of pumping out research nobody is ever gonna read. There are some stars undoubtedly but there are only so many tenure track jobs. Academics have embraced that system for a long time, the journals are just a side-effect of that acceptance.
My perhaps biased belief is they aren't any real constraint. Closed journals do have more power than they should, but they are also an effective signaling mechanism: if something is in X you know it's worth paying attention to over the hundreds of thousands of other papers that will get pushed out every year.
My personal academic experience has been that as the lowliest student at a uni you get access to everything anyway. If you're bored you can Google and grab the pdf. The closed nature hasn't been any real constraint and for the majority of researchers it isn't. You spend more time as a researcher filtering out material that is irrelevant and even now there are a ton of mediocre journals. To answer your question, the effect on the overall academic landscape will probably be minimal.
It's an obvious and easy target - hey, look at this cartel which dominates academia, but academia is a giant cartel, anyway, where everyone follows arbitrary restrictions and rituals because that's how you get a degree and a job. You can even argue (not sure it's believable) that this dynamic is useful - if you want to get access to the world's academic information, you need to get plugged into an institution with scholars around you who can help guide, inform, and interpret your work and the work of others and even if that isn't strictly necessary, it's more beneficial than not. If you're interested in "serious" research, you've probably already self-selected into this system of controlled but essentially free access already.
"essentially free access" costs libraries thousands to millions of dollars a year. For publicly funded or resource constrained institutions librarians have to make hard choices about what they can cancel just to pay for the more expensive journals. Why should publishers get all of this money?
They should not, but that's not to say out of all the things wrong with academia that it's a real chokepoint for research. It's just one small part of a system which throws away millions every year.
I will say this. I am currently a student working in a project and I cannot afford any kind of subscription and my institution does not subscribe to the journals I need for reference.
Without Scihub my project is doomed. I find this a real bottleneck for me.
Not everyone who is doing such academic or is interested in such thing will be in any university anyways; anyone might, whether they are the scientist or mathematician or whatever or if not.
There are the people (including myself too) who will wish to read and to learn these thing even if not in any university and all of those "arbitrary restrictions and rituals". That way, you can learn more rather than being restricted.
The tenure should not be necessary either, to do. Anyone do.
I don't know what country you're in, but here in Australia I have known people have to travel hundreds of kilometres to get access to the latest research. If a wide range of papers are needed this can be cheaper than paying per-article, but is still an extremely expensive method of access to research which (a) we are forced through taxation to partly pay for, and (b) is surprisingly often required (eg. environmental & medical data for legal purposes, making political representations, etc).
I'm not asking how students (and in particular undergrads), or the public are to get access to materials published in journals, but how academics or professionals gain access to publication venues. These are two entirely different matters.
You'll also find that the question of who controls the mafia itself is of utmost significance to those who control the mafia.
O, good point. For universities they probably have a system in place, but otherwise you could put on open access, on arXiv, on viXra, whatever. Is important to have anything even independent might sent too if needing.
What's the problem? Academics and professionals get published by submitting their papers to publication venues. It's really not that difficult to get published as long as you've got something interesting to say.
They're not great, but Elsevier deserves special opprobrium as far as I can tell; just see the longest section in their wikipedia article. They're just so antithetical to what science is about.
