To put it short: Academic "weight" works much like google - the more citations paper has, the higher it is ranked. Of course a citation from local university journal (probably every university has at least one) is worth much, much less than a citation from Nature. It is calculated from Impact Factor, that is in turn calculated from number of citations. Sort of a closed loop.

This would not be too much of a problem if not for funding. You see, funding, that is necessary for anything non-trivial, is usually awarded according to researcher's reputation - something again based on impact, citations, etc.

It might even be more accurate to say that google works like academic "weight" -- it's my understanding that PageRank was originally intended to rank research papers.

yep, "Impact Factor" (IF) is the term, and (just to clarify) it encourages but does not force. there are open access journals like PLoS w/ significant IF, albeit not comparable to Nature.

since the link below was written, PLoS has become not only open access for articles but also open access for the data those articles are based on. imo, open access to data (w/ privacy measures, of course, for human subjects) is of the same order of importance as access to articles.

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/06/20/the-rise-and-f...

This was my immediate question. If the "faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all for free", and then are forced to "buy back the fruits of [their] labour at outrageous prices", why do academic institutions even bother paying money to these companies? If the refereeing is being done for free, naively it surprises me that universities haven't just set up an independent organisation to do peer reviewing.

Researchers don't pay for access to journals, universities do. There is a personal benefit for a researcher to publish on a prestigious but paywalled journal but no personal cost.

A good analogy is a farmer shopping at a supermarket.