I agree with All the points about hiw government sponsored research (including all public school research) Should be free or near free.
The unanswered question is "Why is the market failing?"
A couple unmentioned ideas:
- Until recently, tuition hikes went unchallenged.
- Faculty have a vested interest in maintaining the system. (If my publishing in Journal X marks my competence, what happens if it goes away?)
- An alternate system for rating a very hard to measure topic would be needed. Counting scarce publishing, and references in scarce journals is imperfect but nothing else has beaten it.
I don't have an answer but perhaps a couple bright entrepreneurs could figure out a better equilibrium, and find a way to cross the chasm to get there. Geoffrey Moore would say pick one vertical or academic discipline.
There's an easier answer to this question: because it's not a "market". There is no part of this whose pieces are fungible. Not the researchers, not the ideas, not the papers, not the journals. For "the market" to do its thing (to the extent that we can even say that), it requires the goods for sale or the people providing the services to be substitutable and commodified. That isn't (and pretty much can't) be true of academic publishing.
Thank you for the comments. I appreciate your insights as an academic living through this. Even still, I have to respectfully disagree.
I'll grant that the economics in most textbooks starts with the assumption of homogenous buyers and sellers. Economists have found ways of breaking down this assumption without giving up the concept of a market. Granted you lose "Perfect competition" but that's ok.
Let's look at an analogy...
Rather than academics, let's talk about programmers. There is as much variety in programmer performance as senior faculty performance. The firms that hire these programmers have not been able to create a monopoly. Yes - Google, Microsoft and Facebook have some high margins, but all of them are looking over their shoulders for the next competitor. The technology firm graveyard is filled with former near monopolists. (Excite? Altavista? Compuserve?)
I'm sure that there are reasons for the market failing, but I think it's more than a lack of homogenous products and vendors.
The unanswered question is "Why is the market failing?"
A couple unmentioned ideas:
- Until recently, tuition hikes went unchallenged.
- Faculty have a vested interest in maintaining the system. (If my publishing in Journal X marks my competence, what happens if it goes away?)
- An alternate system for rating a very hard to measure topic would be needed. Counting scarce publishing, and references in scarce journals is imperfect but nothing else has beaten it.
I don't have an answer but perhaps a couple bright entrepreneurs could figure out a better equilibrium, and find a way to cross the chasm to get there. Geoffrey Moore would say pick one vertical or academic discipline.