Comment by bglazer
9 hours ago
> If you're an influential figure at a top-5 department in your field ... you all hate $journal.
That's the problem, they don't hate these journals, they love them. Generally speaking they're old people who became influential by publishing in these journals. Their reputation and influence was built on a pile of Science and Nature papers. Their presentations all include prominent text indicating which figures came from luxury journals. If Science and Nature lose their prestige so do they (or at least that's what they think)
This was very apparent when eLife changed their publishing model. Their was a big outpouring of rage from older scientists who had published in eLife when it was a more standard "high impact" journal. Lots of "you're ruining your reputation and therefore mine".
Maybe I am underestimating the gap in status between the "influential figures" I imagine and the people I actually know.
I see: my friend has 10-15 years of experience in their field, they have enjoyed success and basically got the equivalent of a steady stream of promotions.
I map this onto my big tech/startup experience. I mentally model them as: they are "on top of the pile" of people that still do technical work. Everyone who still has the ability to boss them around, is a manager/institutional politician type figure who wouldn't interfere in such decisions as which journal to publish in.
But probably this mapping is wrong.
Also, I probably have a poor model of what agency and independence looks like in academia. In my big tech world, I have a pretty detailed model in my head of what things I can and can't influence. I don't have this model for academia which is gonna inevitably lead to a lot of "why don't you just".
Same thing happens to me when I moan about work to my friends. They say "I thought you were the tech lead, can't you just decree a change?" and I kinda mumble "er yeah but it doesn't really work like that". So here I'm probably doing that in reverse.
it has been known to happen.
For example, spearheaded by Knuth, the community effectively abandoned the Journal of Algorithms and replaced with with ACM Transactions on Algorithms.
however it's difficult. a big factor is that professors feel obligated towards their students, who need to get jobs. even if the subfield can shift to everybody publishing in a new journal, non-specialists making hiring decisions may not update for a few years which hurts students in the job market.