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?
I'm not surprised that academics would write, typeset, copy-edit, or review the papers themselves.
I AM surprised that all the university administrators (of which there are "too many"?) don't push back at paying tens of thousands of dollars for the journals. I have heard some complaints, but they are apparently ineffective.
So I guess the journals have developed local monopolies over medicine, computer science, etc.?
Is it really just the "brand"? arXiV isn't as strong a brand as Elsevier or whatever?
-----
One thing I've noticed in academia is that brand and name recognition actually matter more than in engineering. In engineering, you can tell if it works or not. You can test it yourself.
In academia, there are only 3 other people in a subfield of a subfield who can tell if it's good. You can't tell yourself. It might take 10 years to sort out of the work is important / good.
So you have to rely on the brand. Popular brands being "this research is from Harvard for field X", or Stanford for field Y, etc.
So I guess "published in journal X" rather than "published in arXiV" is another brand. But somehow they have offloaded all the work that goes into maintaining the brand back onto the academics. Crazy.
> 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.
I'm not surprised that academics would write, typeset, copy-edit, or review the papers themselves.
I AM surprised that all the university administrators (of which there are "too many"?) don't push back at paying tens of thousands of dollars for the journals. I have heard some complaints, but they are apparently ineffective.
So I guess the journals have developed local monopolies over medicine, computer science, etc.?
Is it really just the "brand"? arXiV isn't as strong a brand as Elsevier or whatever?
-----
One thing I've noticed in academia is that brand and name recognition actually matter more than in engineering. In engineering, you can tell if it works or not. You can test it yourself.
In academia, there are only 3 other people in a subfield of a subfield who can tell if it's good. You can't tell yourself. It might take 10 years to sort out of the work is important / good.
So you have to rely on the brand. Popular brands being "this research is from Harvard for field X", or Stanford for field Y, etc.
So I guess "published in journal X" rather than "published in arXiV" is another brand. But somehow they have offloaded all the work that goes into maintaining the brand back onto the academics. Crazy.