What's the incentive for a scientist to hand over copyrights to a journal?
Various Journals have reputations in certain fields and publishing in such a journal is a measure of your ability within your field. I can glance at an academics publications list and get a good measure of their speciality within a field and the likely quality of their work.
There are various methods to add numbers to this. Journals often go by the impact factor and academics are measured by the h-index. Most of these are only relavent within a particular field as some topics are hotter than others and generate more citations.
Historically journals were run by various intellectual societies etc. Papers were submitted for publication and the editors would send manuscripts to other academics for review. All of this was voluntary, not unlike the old days of internet moderation. Of course to distribute the printed volumes of the journal readers were asked to pay. All of this was considered reasonable.
What happened was that text book publishers began to buy up journals and sell tranches of journals to university libraries. You could no longer buy those three subscriptions you need, you’ve have to buy this expensive bundle, oh and you don’t get a print version, that’s extra.
So we now have a situation where government and industry fund scientific research. Academics, who need strong publications to get ahead, write and also review manuscripts for free so that some publishing house can claim massive profits for hosting a bunch of €50 PDFs.
It’s no wonder SCI-HUB, where almost every researcher I know pirates papers daily, has taken off.
Apparently, people would rather submit to abusive high impact journals than help raise the impact factor of open access journals.
What journals and publishers provide are: esteem, convenience, trust, correctness, and, and this might sound outrageous in the age of the bazaar, but exclusivity. There is an awful lot of crap out there. In my opinion, the best feature publishers (open access or otherwise) provide is being a filter for all the noise of the internet. Some journals are better at this than others and reputation is hard earnt and easily lost.
Also, I can't speak for all OA journals, but the Impact Factor is considered an awful metric and avoided. There is the rise of so-called 'alt-metrics', but I've yet to see anything less-awful come out of that yet.
What baffles me is why these people choose academia. It's a really uncertain and laborious way to even sustain oneself, let alone succeed.
Basically, a paper that is published in a journal like Nature or Science or the field-specific top journals is assumed by the community to have been reviewed at much higher standards than those published in lesser known journals, just because it is much, much more difficult to publish in these journals. Thus a paper there will be a signal that you are a capable scientist.
Also, peer review is necessary as protection against crap. I am not saying that this is a fool-proof system, but science has to have one, preprints should exist but science needs to be reviewed and approved by professionals in some way, and the professional reviewers need to be incentivised to do a decent job.
Peer review may be the only asset keeping journals alive at the moment. I've been wondering whether traditional journals can be overcome by making high-quality peer review the focus of the business model.