The entrenchment is due to perceived (and cultivated) prestige, less so about tangible benefits. Prestigious journals have good brand value, they spend money cultivating it and they extract earnings from it.
Researchers and administrators trade on journal brand value for career advancements. They benefit from a highly prestige-stratified journal catalog as a tool for differentiating themselves from their peers, it's much easier to justify a promotion based on 'X publications to prestigious journal A, B, C' than 'bunch of people in the community think this is a great result', especially to a non-expert.
In all seriousness, I have always thought that Blockchain could pose a good solution for the issue of peer-reviewing scientific papers. It provides a descentralized infrastructure with "tokens" that can be transferred to provide "prestige" to papers and authors.
which is all to say, like so many of the things people want to use a block chain for, the hard part is the politics and the real-world nuance, not the immutable ledger. the immutable ledger is not trivial. but compared to the other stuff, it's not all that hard (and is certainly more solved, at this point).
However, I would like to easily see a non-political db where you can easily track the paper graph to figure out which papers are based on discredited research and/or researchers taking money from special interest groups.
* or if not "free", a very small marginal cost, in terms of say data aggregation and programming effort
Similar issues occur for review articles, which are about analyzing data already present rather than analyzing new data. Moreover, this would also hurt actual replications. It kind of seems like being the last to replicate something would be without compensation.
I hope this publication gets an implementation soon.
This is why you can't get too angry at the scientists who continue to publish in it. If you kill yourself to figure something out worthy of a tiny Nobel prize, are you really not going to claim it? It's not like claiming that tiny Nobel prize is gonna hurt the dissemination of your work. The higher profile of your work will easily compensate for the fact people have to jump through a hoop to read it.
This is why I love sci-hub. It just destroys the hoop. It doesn't need to figure out how to replace the brand, history and exclusivity of publications like Nature. Along with government-mandated open source laws, it's one of the only realistic ways to actually disrupt this industry.
Since sci-hub, the library has been able to drop a bunch of journals and for some mysterious reason none of the academics seem to give as much of a shit anymore. Obviously, no-one has no idea why..
And I'm afraid that, even though a lot is changing, the disproportionate monetising isn't yet done for.
The hard part in this is remaining silent and pretending you don’t know anything about this, when you meet your peers at conferences.
Even if all these clues could be effectively removed, the nature of the research work, tools used, writing style, all unambiguously indicate authorship to someone in the field. I think for this reason double-blind review is not popular.
Which is not to say that it would be great if it were possible...
See the "anonymity" section.
It's generally not considered conflict of interest, as the boards transcend single institutions and their members tend to be individuals in the stage of career where their individual reputations that matter more than the reputation of the institution they "represent".
The problem is that changing an existing culture that is deep in everything how this system works is difficult. This goes way beyond the mere question of publication, it's still pretty common to hire people based on high impact factor journal publications etc.
You're faced with a system that's controlled by the people who made their career in this system. They're not the most qualified to improve the failures of that system. Changing it is possible, but it's hard and it's a slow process.
(That said, it's definitely not like nothing has changed! There's a lot changing at the moment, and it's not quite sure what the system is going to look like. Traditional publishers aren't looking too bad yet, though.)