Well for the first several hundred years they actually produced a product that they mailed to people and that took employees and infra that the various unis didn't care to have (with some exceptions for university presses like Oxford and Cambridge). Now it's 100% momentum and branding. You publish in Science because that's the impressive one for Science.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Hmm. How prevalent are actual paper journals now? It wouldn't surprise me if certain researchers were slow to adopt the digital version.

I figured there must be something keeping it going. There is no free lunch.

[–] anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

American copyright law? Basically every research institution in America pays them lots of money for electronic subscriptions in order to not get sued. Like academics don't give a fuck and will use scihub or email a friend or whatever but their institution will just subscribe to a plausible number of things to avoid drawing the attention of the publishers. For profit research like pharma or industrial chem are even more buttoned up because they are much juicier targets for potential IP suits.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The manuscripts belong to the creators to start with, and continue to to some degree in some cases, I'm pretty sure. That's still a free lunch for the journal.

Also, copyrights are not an exclusively American thing, as a non-American. No need to put that on yourself.