In my view a free market cant include massive asymmetries of power between actors. Individual authors face large costs for not playing the game, and Elsevier and others have used their market power to do everything they can to perpetuate a stupid system of intellectual snobbery that keeps them incumbent. Authors are in small part to blame, but mostly they are the victims.

Citation needed that it's a free market. It looks a lot like a market where entrenched players have excessive power.

No, they don't. Not unless you want to sabotage your own career.

There is a limited set of journals for a specific area of science, and you need to publish in the most reputable journal possible. There is only a very limited choice here in most cases.

Most authors are rated based on the journals they publish in, and the most prestigious journals are typically from predatory publishers (Elsevier, Nature etc., yes I know that predatory journal is typically used in other context).

> It's a free market.

Free market is not magic.

Do you want to learn how network effects combine with coordination problem?

This is simply not true. Funding agencies, revieweds and universities incentivize the researchers to publish in "high-impact" journals.

If researchers weren't pushed by institutions to publish more and more and in highly ranked journals things would be much better.

The problem is nobody wants to do the move (researchers, institutions, funding agencies), so publishers (Elsevier isn't alone, ACS, Springer, Wiley, they all do that) increase the prices as much as they can because nothing happened when they did. And even now, as was shown by a comment above only a tiny percentage of their clients take action...

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-th... talks about that

They choose the journals because if they don't, their career doesn't advance.

It's a classic collective-action problem: you need a large portion of researchers to more or less simultaneously stop doing it. Good luck with that.

The journal system/cartel is an effective oligopoly.

You misspelled oligopoly. My guess from your comment is that you don't have a handle on how academia works, which is perfectly fine. You don't have to. But then don't hold such strong opinions because what you wrote is not even wrong.