There Is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch | Peer to Peer Review

"There are a lot of reasons that it's difficult to change the way we publish scholarship. A majority of faculty don't think there's anything wrong with the system that giving the library more money won't fix. Since research is a major part of their job, getting published is important to them. And though there's a lot of inflation in the total number of publications faculty are expected to produce, nobody wants to risk being seen as a slacker....Those who are eligible for tenure don't want to rock the boat. Like the school lunch program, their research is largely funded by public dollars, funding that's just too good a free lunch for corporations to pass up. It's startling to join a scholarly society and find yourself paying Taylor & Francis or Wiley for the membership, but a lot of organizations do that now; it beats trying to run things yourself....Where there's lots of public money, corporations will follow, and they can get congress to work against taxpayers' interests because, hey, it costs a lot to get elected these days....As in the case of school lunches, we spend a lot of money for a good thing...in the case of scholarly research, a proliferation of expensive publications that include fourth and fifth-rate niche journals that proliferate to publish all the stuff productive faculty churn out to prove how productive they are...."