Nature does not solicit your work and then hold them hostage. That's the relevant difference here.

Also, they don't sell your email address to spammers and refuse all attempts to get off their lists (like scirp does).

Yep. Nature and Elsevier have their own issues but this is a different context.

Im just a simple country chicken (in that I know nothing about academia). Explain to me why there isnt more competition in this space? Arent these just high falutin' blogs?

I get that each has built industry specific social capital, but what makes it so hard to establish a new platform?

The answer varies according to study fields.

In Computational Linguistics (disclaimer: I'm a member of the ACL, the association that organizes the bigger conferences) you only pay the conference fee for at least one author to present your results. You pay ~$700 (students and virtual attendees pay less, but depends heavily on the location of the conference), your paper is published online for free, and you also get a conference out of it.

The main problem are Universities: when applying for a position, each University will rank you based on which conferences you've published. CL conferences used to be ranked lower than CL journals, so if you want to have a chance at tenure then you have to aim for the well-established ones. Why are they well-established? I can't say for sure but my best guess would be "look at all the marketing a $10k publication fee can buy".

Interesting. What is holding together the relationship between the pubs credibility and the universities? Is their money changing hands? Laziness in that they sort of do the filtering work for them? Or is it just good ole incumbency?

From an outsiders perspective it would seem pairing individuals (university and department heads) personal reputations in press with the sloppiness or unseriousness of the process would at least create some stakes for the decision makers no?

Based on third-hand versions of events I've heard, it's a mixture of bureaucy (no one was ever fired for ranking Nature on top), (inter)national rankings ("I know this conference is better, but those are the rankings the funding agency sent us") and the amount of people willing to champion an issue in a board meeting. And then there's inertia: "This ranking got us good researchers so far so I see no good reason for changing it and devaluate everybody's publications".

I've never witnessed straight corruption, but I did witness marketing teams sent to prey on researcher's fears. So I wouldn't discount that too.

Informative and concise. How can I subscribe to both of your journals?

In the social sciences, higher-ranked journals publish higher-impact (that is, more highly cited) papers. This is not causal but those journals tend to publish palpably better motivated, better explained, and better executed studies.

When you go up for tenure, your publications are still fresh, so your impact is hard to know. So the rough rank of the journals in which you publish is a proxy for it. This is why universities reward publishing in some journals rather than in others.

Why do higher-ranked journals publish better studies? This may be for a number of reasons. Better studies are more likely to be submitted to higher-ranked journals first rather than to lower-ranked journals. Researchers who write better referee reports are more likely to accept requests to referee papers at those journals. And the editors may shepherd papers at such journals better too.

Notably, predatory journals do none of these. It is no surprise that publishing in predatory journals will not get you tenure nor promotion at such universities.

Have you tried publishing in Nature? Did they tell you that yeah, we're happy to publish your paper for a small fee because we only publish high-quality papers, wink-wink, nudge-nudge?

Do you often get emails from Nature soliciting your papers, or asking you to be a keynote speaker in their conference, dear Dr/ Professor <your name spliced on your co-author's name when you were still a PhD student>?

No? Well, that's because "predatory journals" are not the same thing as Nature.

I mean fuck Nature, don't make me defend those assholes, but please be aware of what the hell you're talking about.