I'm not so much sympathetic to publishers as I'm a reformed populist. I had formerly held the usual HN view, that Elsevier is the only journal publisher, that they act differently than anyone else, that somehow they have cornered a market or tricked people onto paying too much money.
Imagine my surprise when I found out, actually academia only uses them because prestigious journal publication is the only real metric it used to assign research positions. They literally don't need to use these publishers, but they won't stop because otherwise they'd have to find another way to decide who gets to do the research. Elsevier just puts its hand out and asks for whatever it wants and gets it because academia doesn't want the system to change, it just wants a bigger budget and this is a politically tenable way to pressure for a discount.
From seeing the purchasing side of academic journals, I definitely don't think that Elseiver is the only journal publisher, or that they act differently than anyone else, and I agree that popular discussion often thinks they are more special than they are.
But what they are is indeed the biggest one. And, from the purchasing side, one thing that gives them is the ability to get universities into these giant package deals. (I also wouldn't be surprised if they have bigger profit margins than their competitors -- but of course their for-profit competitors would love to be as profitable and are doing their best).
Mostly I think it's much more complicated than "as long as universities use prestige of journals published in to decide tenure, journal publishers will be able to extract enormous profits from universities."
For reasons I've tried to touch upon.
I think while you are perhaps a reformed populist, you are perhaps still as interested in over-simplified one-factor explanations as you used to be, you've just flipped em.
Why shouldn't this editorial board be able to take their "prestige" with them to the new journal they are founding, with the purpose of being more affordable? (I agree there are reasons this is probably not going to lead to widespread changes in the market, but I don't think it's because they can't take the journal's prestige with them in this individual case, I don't see any reason why not).
What about fields like computer science where tenure decisions, while still based on publication, are not generally based on publication in for-profit journals from Elsevier or anyone else?
Another thing to look at in the market is the transition from print to electronic that happened over the past honestly not much more than 20 years, in which I believe it could be shown that % of university acquisitions budgets spent on journals as well as profit margins of publishers have skyrocketed -- but I don't believe academic's interest in "prestige" used to be a lot less.
I agree that tenure and promotion processes are pretty broken, I'm not trying to defend them. I just don't think they are a one-note explanation of the academic publishing market.
But I certainly identify with being really frustrated with academia and how it works. It's a mess.
I'm still curious if you work for a journal publisher or used to.
Imagine my surprise when I found out, actually academia only uses them because prestigious journal publication is the only real metric it used to assign research positions. They literally don't need to use these publishers, but they won't stop because otherwise they'd have to find another way to decide who gets to do the research. Elsevier just puts its hand out and asks for whatever it wants and gets it because academia doesn't want the system to change, it just wants a bigger budget and this is a politically tenable way to pressure for a discount.