For us academics the ‘literature’ is our peer reviewed repository of scientific knowledge.

Various Journals have reputations in certain fields and publishing in such a journal is a measure of your ability within your field. I can glance at an academics publications list and get a good measure of their speciality within a field and the likely quality of their work.

There are various methods to add numbers to this. Journals often go by the impact factor and academics are measured by the h-index. Most of these are only relavent within a particular field as some topics are hotter than others and generate more citations.

Historically journals were run by various intellectual societies etc. Papers were submitted for publication and the editors would send manuscripts to other academics for review. All of this was voluntary, not unlike the old days of internet moderation. Of course to distribute the printed volumes of the journal readers were asked to pay. All of this was considered reasonable.

What happened was that text book publishers began to buy up journals and sell tranches of journals to university libraries. You could no longer buy those three subscriptions you need, you’ve have to buy this expensive bundle, oh and you don’t get a print version, that’s extra.

So we now have a situation where government and industry fund scientific research. Academics, who need strong publications to get ahead, write and also review manuscripts for free so that some publishing house can claim massive profits for hosting a bunch of €50 PDFs.

It’s no wonder SCI-HUB, where almost every researcher I know pirates papers daily, has taken off.

Why can't people abandon the journals that were purchased by text book publishers? If article submission and peer reviewing are completely independent from publishers, creating and migrating to a new journal should be feasible. The PDFs could be distributed via torrents; each author could seed his own work.

Apparently, people would rather submit to abusive high impact journals than help raise the impact factor of open access journals.

Why do people use Facebook or Twitter or Instagram? Convenience mostly, and some nice features that emerge from centralisation. People, including academics, are about as willing to give up their copyright in order to be published as your average Joe is willing to give up their privacy by using Facebook.

What journals and publishers provide are: esteem, convenience, trust, correctness, and, and this might sound outrageous in the age of the bazaar, but exclusivity. There is an awful lot of crap out there. In my opinion, the best feature publishers (open access or otherwise) provide is being a filter for all the noise of the internet. Some journals are better at this than others and reputation is hard earnt and easily lost.

Also, I can't speak for all OA journals, but the Impact Factor is considered an awful metric and avoided. There is the rise of so-called 'alt-metrics', but I've yet to see anything less-awful come out of that yet.

Some people do, but most don't because they don't really care about science or spreading information, but just getting an easier way to progress in their career. And the system is gatekeeped mostly by such people, so in a lot of fields one is at considerable disadvantage if they care about things other than selfish career development.

What baffles me is why these people choose academia. It's a really uncertain and laborious way to even sustain oneself, let alone succeed.

Trust building and a seal of quality through peer review.

Basically, a paper that is published in a journal like Nature or Science or the field-specific top journals is assumed by the community to have been reviewed at much higher standards than those published in lesser known journals, just because it is much, much more difficult to publish in these journals. Thus a paper there will be a signal that you are a capable scientist.

Also, peer review is necessary as protection against crap. I am not saying that this is a fool-proof system, but science has to have one, preprints should exist but science needs to be reviewed and approved by professionals in some way, and the professional reviewers need to be incentivised to do a decent job.

Peer review may be the only asset keeping journals alive at the moment. I've been wondering whether traditional journals can be overcome by making high-quality peer review the focus of the business model.

In many cases, it’s a scientist’s only way to advance his or her career.

This is the actual incentive, from a researcher's point of view. Even when there are plenty of outlets that provide quality control, archival, etc., researchers still submit to the same traditional journals because those journals' brand names are the stamp they need on their CV to advance an academic career that is already incredibly unlikely (due to their being far more applicants than positions).

It's not the only way, but an easier one if the scientist just cares about their own ass.

It's a (fairly) standardized, robust, and trusted way of peer-reviewing data and results. Without some mechanism like that, there's no easy way to tell if Dr. X's results are as well peer-reviewed as Dr. Y's, at least as it currently stands.

Exactly this. Also different journals act as a weak filter for impact of the research.

In some countries, especially in Europe, there are even tables ranking all journals and essentially assigning a point value. Whether you get promoted or fired depends on how high your score is.