Frankly I dislike the situation as well but I like to play devil's advocate for a bit.
In some sense attaching a high cost to a paper is a crude way of proving the quality of the paper. Putting all of the cost with the authors is clearly not ideal, because you'd only measure how much someone is willing to pay to get it published. By placing the cost with the people reading the article you ensure that the publisher must ensure their articles are actually worth reading.
The fact that getting incentives to align requires a random party to get large profits without actually doing much is a quirk of capitalism. If you ignore the concept of private property for a bit you'll see that the obvious solution is to simply burn up the excess money (capitalists would attempt to sustain the illusion that money is indelible and privately owned by viewing this as a tax).
Cost =/= quality on papers, almost all of the "best writings of all time" are public domain, and many of the best papers absolutely free.
And most researchers want their papers to be free, to the point where you can email them and they will give you a free copy, and they post the preprints on arXiv and their personal website to get around publishing requirements.
The journals aren't there to help spread their content they're there to give the content a seal of authenticity. As long as they can show researchers/universities are willing to pay high fees they can claim that their contents must be worth that much.
Having free copies of the papers available doesn't actually hurt them much, provided they're still the source for 'authentic' copies.
(sidenote: not sure what field you're talking about where the best writings of all time are public domain but I've had to pluck quite a few famous papers of scihub instead)
You are interested in say a subset of research on morel mushrooms.
You know who the reputed people who publish are so you "follow" them and their profile. They did a new peer review of a newcomer and you get alerted. You check their work and are impressed so you follow them too.
Your favourite researcher Also curates "his" favorite researches and researchers on their blog so you are one click away from their opinions on what is good or bad.
Compare that with a "reputed journal". The way the system is designed, the journals work of sorting and filtering, the reader is expected to trust their research of choosing the work so you trust their judgment and you auto assume the work is good.
Why don't you democratize that work to domain experts itself and everyone helps everyone else. Isn't that the case with everything online?
That's not playing devil's advocate, that is playing clueless. It's the institutions paying for paper access, and not on a "per paper" basis; no ones incentives are being aligned, no one is actually paying $50 to read a paper.
If (as I claimed) it's just a token cost, I don't think it matters much who is paying it. In fact it is almost better if they get to claim universities find it worth an expensive subscription, it's not like they're trying to cover costs they're putting up a barrier to show it is worth the trouble.
Comments
Frankly I dislike the situation as well but I like to play devil's advocate for a bit.
In some sense attaching a high cost to a paper is a crude way of proving the quality of the paper. Putting all of the cost with the authors is clearly not ideal, because you'd only measure how much someone is willing to pay to get it published. By placing the cost with the people reading the article you ensure that the publisher must ensure their articles are actually worth reading.
The fact that getting incentives to align requires a random party to get large profits without actually doing much is a quirk of capitalism. If you ignore the concept of private property for a bit you'll see that the obvious solution is to simply burn up the excess money (capitalists would attempt to sustain the illusion that money is indelible and privately owned by viewing this as a tax).
Cost =/= quality on papers, almost all of the "best writings of all time" are public domain, and many of the best papers absolutely free.
And most researchers want their papers to be free, to the point where you can email them and they will give you a free copy, and they post the preprints on arXiv and their personal website to get around publishing requirements.
The journals aren't there to help spread their content they're there to give the content a seal of authenticity. As long as they can show researchers/universities are willing to pay high fees they can claim that their contents must be worth that much.
Having free copies of the papers available doesn't actually hurt them much, provided they're still the source for 'authentic' copies.
(sidenote: not sure what field you're talking about where the best writings of all time are public domain but I've had to pluck quite a few famous papers of scihub instead)
Why isn't academia a more social activity?
Think of this analogy.
You are interested in say a subset of research on morel mushrooms.
You know who the reputed people who publish are so you "follow" them and their profile. They did a new peer review of a newcomer and you get alerted. You check their work and are impressed so you follow them too.
Your favourite researcher Also curates "his" favorite researches and researchers on their blog so you are one click away from their opinions on what is good or bad.
Compare that with a "reputed journal". The way the system is designed, the journals work of sorting and filtering, the reader is expected to trust their research of choosing the work so you trust their judgment and you auto assume the work is good.
Why don't you democratize that work to domain experts itself and everyone helps everyone else. Isn't that the case with everything online?
That's not playing devil's advocate, that is playing clueless. It's the institutions paying for paper access, and not on a "per paper" basis; no ones incentives are being aligned, no one is actually paying $50 to read a paper.
If (as I claimed) it's just a token cost, I don't think it matters much who is paying it. In fact it is almost better if they get to claim universities find it worth an expensive subscription, it's not like they're trying to cover costs they're putting up a barrier to show it is worth the trouble.