Well, then you have to come up with a good idea how to change the nature of humans. We thrive on fame as social status currency

Not just in science. The equivalent in startups might be a famous VC or whatever. It’s about attaching yourself to a brand.

this has nothing to do with some mystical 'nature of humans', we're just stuck in a bad nash equilibrium.

Journals thrive on reputation and nobody can individually dissent because they lose out. This is the same mechanism that keeps overpriced tuition fees at ivy league colleges afloat.

The answer is to collectively get out by legislating the practice or offering a free public alternative that everybody can immediately jump too. Given that the efforts become more and more organised, (German wholesale boycott of Elsevier) this might be happening sooner than later.

But Arxiv has been around for years and the Journals haven't died yet.

Just offering a superior platform is not enough, as said in the last post, you also must create a way to collectively move everybody over and break the feedback loop of prestige journals.

The same happens with social networks. You could offer the freest, most privacy respecting network of all, as long as individuals get punished for leaving the old one individually it'll never take over a significant amount of market share, even if everyone on the old network agrees that the newer one is better.

I'd say arxiv isn't a superior platform. It is in that it is free, but it is the filtering effect of peer review that seems important. I'd say you don't need to actually filter, just some sort of measure of quality to make searching easy. I look for papers these days by hopping links on google scholar citations. This works well for finding good "older" papers. I want a mechanism for quickly finding good new papers. Then you have your superior platform.

Everybody would agree on this - in theory. But you don’t say how this should happen, and this is where it breaks down. The only thing that comes to mind is “magic”...

... which is exactly our problem. Everyone (bar the publishers) hates the status quo, but nobody knows how to break it. My personal hope is that sci-hub will gradually erode the profitability of scientific publishing down to nothing, but breaking the stranglehold of publishers will almost certainly be a long and painful process.

http://honisoit.com/2015/11/the-dictatorship-with-no-dictato...

Well, there are a couple ways it could happen.

1. The governmemt could require you to publish all your research in an open way, if it ever funded anything to do with your research. No open access, no government money.

2. Universities could band together and do something about it.

This could happen both on the demand side, AND on the supply sude. For example, they could either collectively refuse to pay for journals, OR collectively refuse to hire professors who don't publish open access.

Want to get Tenure? Well you are forced to publish open access. Don't like it? Then go find a different University to work for. But that might be difficult if those OTHER universies collude against you with the same rules.

The problem (in this case) isn't "social status currency". It's that the social status currency system has real (financial) costs too!

The value of a prestige journal brand is that it is (supposedly) selective in which papers it publishes; not that it costs a lot of money for people to read those papers.

Prestige is one of the absolute hardest things to "move."