> Simpler explanation is that academics fear each other more than they fear closed access. So they won't publish in an open journal for fear their colleagues will get ahead by publishing in a prestigious closed journal.
That first sentence seems a bit like saying that people suffering from starvation fear their fellow men, simply because they are competing for a scarce resource.
What I, as an academic, fear, or at least have to respond to, is an incentive system that judges the quality of my publications on the established reputations of the journals in which they appear. It's true that my fellow academics are rivals for promotions and positions, and in this respect I suppose that I fear them in some way; but they suffer as much from the system as I do, and some of the most established use their prestige to fight the good fight (Timothy Gowers being one of the big names on that list), and so I think that the antagonistic sound of saying that I fear them is not accurate in its implication even if it is so in some technical sense.
I've never fully understood this view, since 'the system' that we all suffer at the hand of is just a collection of our fellow academics. Hiring committees, grant selection panels etc. are a bunch of our peers doing exactly the thing that so many of us (including the people that I sit on these panels with) gripe about - judging the worth of others based on silly metrics and the journals in which they publish.
> I've never fully understood this view, since 'the system' that we all suffer at the hand of is just a collection of our fellow academics.
The first layer, yes, but after that come non-specialist academics, who aren't qualified to judge my particular work on its merits, and so have to substitute some other metric; and then administrators, whose fitness to judge the merits of any academic work is, let me say, not necessarily a given. For example, even without any worries of bias: as a mathematician, it is always a struggle to get non-mathematicians, even (or perhaps especially) other scientists, to realise that author order on mathematicians' papers reflects only one's place in the alphabet, not one's contribution.
Author order is such an arcane nonsense, and needs to be dismantled. The "roles" indicated by position are peculiar to the discipline and a mystery outside it. The customary position of senior academics e.g. as the "anchor" can confer significant prestige on that academic, while their contribution might be minimal (and even zero, in exploitative situations).
It really is bewildering.
Online academic communities and publishers such as ResearchGate and EndNote could come up with potential solutions here. ResearchGate already asks us to effectively vote about other users' authorship and expertise. Adding a voting system (or similar) whereby users declare the roles played by each author might help dismantle author position hegemony.
Voting might be imperfect, and perhaps there are other options. The current system, though, is ridiculous and contributes towards the exploitation of junior academics, and poor inter-discipline communication. Clearer computational representation of roles could also improve search.
That first sentence seems a bit like saying that people suffering from starvation fear their fellow men, simply because they are competing for a scarce resource.
What I, as an academic, fear, or at least have to respond to, is an incentive system that judges the quality of my publications on the established reputations of the journals in which they appear. It's true that my fellow academics are rivals for promotions and positions, and in this respect I suppose that I fear them in some way; but they suffer as much from the system as I do, and some of the most established use their prestige to fight the good fight (Timothy Gowers being one of the big names on that list), and so I think that the antagonistic sound of saying that I fear them is not accurate in its implication even if it is so in some technical sense.