Because universities don't have an alternative. There are two things to realize about this situation:
1. It occurs because academia is a planned, quasi-socialist economy in which there are no market signals anywhere. However even if you get rid of market economics you still need some way to allocate resources. Weird academia-specific hacks like impact factors are the result: they're basically a form of whuffie-like currency, and are used to replace price signals.
2. Academics could change it because they have tremendous freedom and nobody forces them to organize this way, but they never will, because academia is dominated by people who are very sympathetic to Marxist pseudo-economics [1]. Indeed that's how it justifies its own existence: the value of academia to society is framed in terms of negative assumptions about what market-oriented capitalist research can or will do.
It's easy to illustrate the latter point in this case. The author identifies that their system is screwed up and then blames "chokepoint capitalism". Ah yes. A near totally government funded system has an absurd structure because of too much capitalism.
Wrong. Corporate research doesn't have this set of problems at all. The journal system exists exactly because without capitalism academics have to come up with some alternative, and in a centrally planned economy there's no incentive for that alternative to make sense or be any good. So they've drifted into this situation where third parties sell them an alternative ideologically acceptable pseudo-currency called reputation metrics, because they weren't even capable of setting up their own, and flail around mis-diagnosing their situation. Want to get rid of journals? Sure, no problem. Go work for a private sector R&D lab where papers get published on their website and your career ladder is based on the actual market impact of your work, not the impact-factor of where you publish it.
What an abysmal take. Academia is arguably the one place in modern society where the human drive for curiosity does not need to be tied to some notion of utility. It would be terrible to corrupt this with the introduction of a market. Saying that the problem with academia is a matter of assessing “market impact” is missing the point entirely. First and foremost, academia should be about advancing our understanding of the world around us. Figuring out potential applications of this knowledge is a secondary goal, best left to engineers and researchers at companies whose role it is to extract profit from scientific knowledge.
Academia should be about many noble and idealistic things. What it's actually about is producing as many publishable papers as possible, many of which will turn out on close inspection to be nonsensical, non-replicable, waffle, statements of the obvious or outright loopy ideological rants. Having read lots of research papers in recent years, I feel very strongly that the ones that were worth it came overwhelmingly from corporate labs, or sometimes collaborations between universities and corporate labs. Purely academic papers tend to have an extremely low ROI for reading them, and that's ignoring the research that is outright deceptive or fraudulent!
Planned economies very inefficiently produce crap. That was one of the big lessons of the 20th century. We have a planned economy for research and not surprisingly there's lots of dysfunctionality, like the work being published in ways that mean its own authors can lose the ability to read it. It's not a morally defensible system really, which is why so many defenses of it are vague appeals to the idea that academics are somehow purer intellects than everyone else. They aren't.
1. It occurs because academia is a planned, quasi-socialist economy in which there are no market signals anywhere. However even if you get rid of market economics you still need some way to allocate resources. Weird academia-specific hacks like impact factors are the result: they're basically a form of whuffie-like currency, and are used to replace price signals.
2. Academics could change it because they have tremendous freedom and nobody forces them to organize this way, but they never will, because academia is dominated by people who are very sympathetic to Marxist pseudo-economics [1]. Indeed that's how it justifies its own existence: the value of academia to society is framed in terms of negative assumptions about what market-oriented capitalist research can or will do.
It's easy to illustrate the latter point in this case. The author identifies that their system is screwed up and then blames "chokepoint capitalism". Ah yes. A near totally government funded system has an absurd structure because of too much capitalism.
Wrong. Corporate research doesn't have this set of problems at all. The journal system exists exactly because without capitalism academics have to come up with some alternative, and in a centrally planned economy there's no incentive for that alternative to make sense or be any good. So they've drifted into this situation where third parties sell them an alternative ideologically acceptable pseudo-currency called reputation metrics, because they weren't even capable of setting up their own, and flail around mis-diagnosing their situation. Want to get rid of journals? Sure, no problem. Go work for a private sector R&D lab where papers get published on their website and your career ladder is based on the actual market impact of your work, not the impact-factor of where you publish it.
[1] http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1...