I do not understand how this system has existed this long.
Well for the first several hundred years they actually produced a product that they mailed to people and that took employees and infra that the various unis didn't care to have (with some exceptions for university presses like Oxford and Cambridge). Now it's 100% momentum and branding. You publish in Science because that's the impressive one for Science.
Network effect with a hint of extortion.
I think it’s wild how much job security professors often have and yet they let themselves get dicked around like this constantly
How is this a thing? How has nobody just started hosting their own papers? What does it need except a fairly basic website and some storage for the papers themselves? Forgive the ignorance, I’m an IT guy not a scientist…
Because the journals provide a quality gate. To be published in, say, Nature is a career peak for most scientists. While counting references to a paper can tell you some things about its relative merit, it’s not as clear an indicator as having a PNAS, Cell or similar on your resume.
They have created a market for their name so it self-perpetuates.
That quality gate hasn't been doing it's job for a long time.
In certain fields, at least, there are important steps these papers provide such as screening and review that are simply not feasible through as self-hosted. People who understand what the paper is about and can sniff out bullshit - be it cooked numbers, incorrect figures, improper citations, etc. are an important part of the process. Heck, even among academic papers out there, some are much lower 'quality' than others in that they are frequently bought off or have poor review processes allowing fluff and bad science to get through.
With all that being said, scihub is a thing and even paid journals are often easily pirated.
Peer review is false security, so much bad and fraudulent science gets through, but due to the stamp of authority people are less skeptical. Additionally it's harder to publish good science.
There's a lot of people who understand this better than me who can explain it. Here's one starting point. https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
So I actually spent a few seconds thinking about it and I think the main problem would come down to moderation? Ultimately if someone who wrote a paper wanted to distribute it they could do so using existing sites like pastebin or GitHub. The concern with running one myself would be “how do I know this doesn’t contain child abuse images or something”.
It's a bit of a circular problem. Certain journals have a reputation of publishing higher quality work, so if you see where it's published, you're more likely to read it. Since it draws in readers, it leads to more citations. More citations means more people want to publish there, meaning that the journal gets to be more selective and gets to choose the cream of the crop. Thus maintaining their reputation of publishing higher quality work.
I'm so happy that in my field, most of the papers I read are open access and some of the most important journals are not from large publishers.
It's even worse than the music distribution industry.
Found this https://arxiv.org/
arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
There’s also Sci Hub
But yea time for shit to change and drop the parasites
There are a bunch of field-specific preprint services like arXiv: PsyArXiv, SocARXIV, engrXiV, AgriXiv, etc. The OSF also hosts preprints for various disciplines.
The important thing to remember is that preprints are not peer-reviewed and have not been vetted in any way. A paper may change a lot (or just a little) between preprint submission and final publication. A recent paper of mine had a few sections added for clarity, which wouldn't appear in a preprint.
