Not just in science. The equivalent in startups might be a famous VC or whatever. It’s about attaching yourself to a brand.
Journals thrive on reputation and nobody can individually dissent because they lose out. This is the same mechanism that keeps overpriced tuition fees at ivy league colleges afloat.
The answer is to collectively get out by legislating the practice or offering a free public alternative that everybody can immediately jump too. Given that the efforts become more and more organised, (German wholesale boycott of Elsevier) this might be happening sooner than later.
The same happens with social networks. You could offer the freest, most privacy respecting network of all, as long as individuals get punished for leaving the old one individually it'll never take over a significant amount of market share, even if everyone on the old network agrees that the newer one is better.
http://honisoit.com/2015/11/the-dictatorship-with-no-dictato...
1. The governmemt could require you to publish all your research in an open way, if it ever funded anything to do with your research. No open access, no government money.
2. Universities could band together and do something about it.
This could happen both on the demand side, AND on the supply sude. For example, they could either collectively refuse to pay for journals, OR collectively refuse to hire professors who don't publish open access.
Want to get Tenure? Well you are forced to publish open access. Don't like it? Then go find a different University to work for. But that might be difficult if those OTHER universies collude against you with the same rules.
The value of a prestige journal brand is that it is (supposedly) selective in which papers it publishes; not that it costs a lot of money for people to read those papers.