"you're paying Elsevier for lending you the weight of their brands, because it's beneficial to you to do so. What's wrong with that?"
1. Academic publishers do nothing to contribute to the strength of these "brands;" the reviewers and editors voluntarily do so. Nobody says, "Springer publishes that journal, so it must be a good one!"
2. Publish-or-perish is extreme destructive to research. Researchers frequently avoid difficult problems because such problems make it hard to publish at the expected rate. The existence of the academic publishing system, combined with the focus on journal names rather than research quality, creates and encourages the publish-or-perish system. The overall effect is detrimental to everyone, including researchers who are forced to shy away from the problems they set out to address in order to meet the demand to publish papers.
"Hell, even tech companies pay for brands. They don't recruit at Berkeley and Stanford just to get a look at peoples' github repositories."
Unlike academic publishers, Berkeley and Stanford actively maintain a level of quality that companies who recruit there expect. At the very least, those schools pay the faculty who make their curricula valuable to students; there is an expectation that by completing the requirements for a degree at such schools, students have proved their merit.
Academic publishers do nothing to maintain the quality of scientific journals; they contribute only their name, and are able to do so only because their businesses receive special, privileged protection by the government (copyrights and trademarks). The "value" of these "brands" is artificial, created by a system of laws that is grossly outdated and which no longer serves its purpose (at least as far as scientific research is concerned). We once needed academic publishers to facilitate the communication of scientific results; times have changed, we now have a better way for scientists to communicate, and all that remains is to incentivize its use (much like we incentivized the academic publishing business with copyright law).
"Signaling, filtering, vetting, vouching are intrinsic to human society"
I fail to see how this is relevant to a discussion about academic publishers, as academic publishers do not do any of the above. Again, review is generally done by volunteers, and editing is frequently voluntary.
"There is nothing coercive about what Elsevier is doing"
Academic publishers coerce researchers into assigning copyrights, and then use those assignments to extract money from those researchers later if they try to reproduce their articles elsewhere. It is coercive because researchers are expected to publish papers in the journals that academic publishers control, and so the researchers must choose between their careers and the demand for a copyright assignment. Not all coercion involves threats of death or imprisonment; threatening a person's livelihood is coercive.
1. Academic publishers do nothing to contribute to the strength of these "brands;" the reviewers and editors voluntarily do so. Nobody says, "Springer publishes that journal, so it must be a good one!"
2. Publish-or-perish is extreme destructive to research. Researchers frequently avoid difficult problems because such problems make it hard to publish at the expected rate. The existence of the academic publishing system, combined with the focus on journal names rather than research quality, creates and encourages the publish-or-perish system. The overall effect is detrimental to everyone, including researchers who are forced to shy away from the problems they set out to address in order to meet the demand to publish papers.
"Hell, even tech companies pay for brands. They don't recruit at Berkeley and Stanford just to get a look at peoples' github repositories."
Unlike academic publishers, Berkeley and Stanford actively maintain a level of quality that companies who recruit there expect. At the very least, those schools pay the faculty who make their curricula valuable to students; there is an expectation that by completing the requirements for a degree at such schools, students have proved their merit.
Academic publishers do nothing to maintain the quality of scientific journals; they contribute only their name, and are able to do so only because their businesses receive special, privileged protection by the government (copyrights and trademarks). The "value" of these "brands" is artificial, created by a system of laws that is grossly outdated and which no longer serves its purpose (at least as far as scientific research is concerned). We once needed academic publishers to facilitate the communication of scientific results; times have changed, we now have a better way for scientists to communicate, and all that remains is to incentivize its use (much like we incentivized the academic publishing business with copyright law).
"Signaling, filtering, vetting, vouching are intrinsic to human society"
I fail to see how this is relevant to a discussion about academic publishers, as academic publishers do not do any of the above. Again, review is generally done by volunteers, and editing is frequently voluntary.
"There is nothing coercive about what Elsevier is doing"
Academic publishers coerce researchers into assigning copyrights, and then use those assignments to extract money from those researchers later if they try to reproduce their articles elsewhere. It is coercive because researchers are expected to publish papers in the journals that academic publishers control, and so the researchers must choose between their careers and the demand for a copyright assignment. Not all coercion involves threats of death or imprisonment; threatening a person's livelihood is coercive.