Competition in Science: When is it too much of a good thing?

“Clearly, competition is a great incentive and I think everyone can attest to that and not only from personal experience. If competition is lacking, all kinds of bad things tend to happen. For instance, in scholarly publishing, lack of competition leads to the kind of behavior that brought the boycott movement upon corporate publisher Elsevier. How can there be lack of competition when there are more then 24,000 different journals to chose from you ask? The reasons include the following three points: For one, there are only a few publishers out there, with Elsevier owning more than 2,000 journals alone. Second, the part where revenue is generated is mostly reading the journal, not publishing in it: the paper you want to read only exists once, so for each paper the publisher has the monopoly and can thus virtually charge anything they can get away with, and they usually do... Thus, while the renewed attention and vigor for the Open Access movement is to be welcomed and enforced, I do have quite large reservations as to the motivations and goals of some of the organizers and supporters of this boycott. Tim Gowers, for instance, one of the main drivers behind the boycott, has recently formalized his and some colleagues' motivations for the boycott movement. It is somewhat surprising that nowhere in this document is there a reference to the underlying cause for the existence of such parasitic publishers, namely that we, the scientists chose to hand over our scholarly communication system to them in the first place... Both sides are completely missing the underlying root cause for the quagmire scholarly communication has been in... Well, this is where the third reason for the lack of competition among journals comes in, journal rank. Publications in hi-rank journals are worth more on the job market than publications in a lo-rank journal... I have argued that libraries seem to be the most natural and cost-effective entity to serve as custodians of our work and communication thereof. We now have the technology to do everything a journal hierarchy does better without any of its drawbacks, so clinging to journal rank in this day and age is really not only anachronistic but also quite irrational... If we brought down corporate publishers and had the full ~10bUS$ annually at our disposal that we currently pay them, we could have an IT assisted alert system at our disposal that would filter and sort all articles in any fields of interest according to a rank of relevance that the user specifies. This kind of technology has been around for about a decade and lots of companies are using it - only scientists are largely unaware of this technology and its potential. There are two main ways to accomplish this: destroy the power of journal rank and replace it with a superior, library-based communication model... “