Serious question: Why do any institutions pay any publisher at all? If everyone just published for free, nobody would need a subscription. What's the point of the publisher?
But if not everybody publishes for free, you can only get access to those articles by paying the publishers.
The follow-up question is: why do people keep publishing there? The answer to that is that funders and institutions use journal brand names as proxies for evaluating candidates for grants or tenure, so publishing your work in traditional pay-walled journals is good for your career despite making your work less accessible.
The follow-up question to that is: why do funders and institutions use journal brand names as proxies? The answer to that may lie in [1], summarised by: there's not really a good alternative. (Full disclosure: I'm working on setting up such an alternative.)
You've just said that some orgs publish in Elsevier because grants and tenure.
Nobody needs to use them. And yet people do use them, fully aware what it will do to the research, because it helps them personally.
My follow-up question is, why are people not mad at the funders and research labs who insist on publishing there? They're burying the research intentionally just to get a better job.
> You've just said that some orgs publish in Elsevier because grants and tenure.
Ah, sorry, I was unclear there. It's not organisations that publish somewhere, but researchers.
And some people are mad at researchers for continuing to publish there, but I find it hard to fault them, because they would probably no longer be researchers if they didn't.
People are also mad at funders for that, but it's hard for any individual funder to change that. For example, a coalition of primarily European funders is currently trying to change the incentives, and they get a lot of setbacks from European researchers who feel that when they get banned from publishing in paywalled journals, they will miss out on foreign career opportunities - which have become an almost required part of any academic career.
(Note that it's not "just to get a better job". It's to have a job in academia at all. The field is very competitive. There's probably people who've taken a stand, but they're likely to have left academia.)
There are limits to how much you can give researchers a pass though. There are plenty of senior researchers who have perfectly secure careers but want a bigger grant, more postdocs, a more prestigious position, etc etc, and of course they hold disproportionate clout with the funding agencies.
I'm sure they feel a genuine obligation to promote their graduate students and ensure that their postdocs get good careers. But as altruistic as they might want to feel, it's still ego, greed, or at best nepotism when they fight regulation which is for the good of the field.
Sure, everyone is responsible to some degree. By far the most important factor, though, is the incentive structure for academics, and I feel that focussing on researchers misses the point at best, and is counterproductive at worst.
