Let me ask you a stupid question about academic publishing

Right now, the majority of academic journals are very expensive to subscribe to. There are some alternative journals, called open-access journals which anyone can read. Most of the time though, these journals cost money to publish in.

As I understand it, the historical reason is this. Once upon a time, journals had to be published in the real world. These journals cost a lot of money because physically publishing things is hard. During this period, the majority of famous journals got bought up by publishing companies. Since these journals owned by publishing companies are still the prestigious journals that people want to publish in, they can still charge these high prices.

So we have an unfortunate combination of network effects, first mover effects, etc. locking in monopolies, and we can’t break out of that easily due to collective action problems- all perfectly comprehensible- an all too common tragedy.

What I don’t understand is why academics aren’t resisting by making more open-access journals. As far as I can tell:

1. It costs approximately zero dollars to create a journal.

2. It costs approximately zero dollars to run a journal.

3. There are plenty of academic bodies and individuals with the prestige to set one up.

Regarding premises 1 and 2, remember that for the most part, no authors, no editors and no peer reviewers are being paid to run journals as far as I can tell these are the only people indispensable to the process.

I could, tomorrow, set up a WordPress page and call it “The Free Journal of Philosophy”. So long as I was willing to accept certain limitations, it would be free. If I was unwilling to accept those limitations, it would cost me a few hundred dollars a year to run. I could accept submissions, and on certain dates, put a group of them into an edition made up of a collection of accepted articles.

Indeed you could set up a journal on Substack for free, ask nicely for money, and maybe you’d even be able to pay authors, editors, and peer reviewers a small honorarium.

Now, you say, “Ahh, but Philosophy Bear, you don’t even have a Ph.D., no one would take your journal seriously”- and this is true! However, there are numerous philosophers who have enough clout they could set up such a webpage and have it be taken seriously. If, say, I dunno, Liam Kofi Bright and David Chalmers announced tomorrow that they were launching The Free Journal of Philosophy I imagine that quite a few people would want to submit to it. Now, granted, it would be a few years until it had a substantial reputation for itself but this is not an insurmountable barrier.

Remember, editors, peer reviewers, and authors already aren’t being paid, so this isn’t a problem. Certainly, there would be no physical publication, and that would be something of a loss, but not very much of one. Already some journals have no physical counterpart. Perhaps in certain cases, something would be lost in terms of typesetting and the like, but I don’t think this really matters all that much certainly not enough to make it worth charging two hundred dollars per article for.

And yes, the incumbency effects of existing journals are massive, but it seems like people aren’t even trying to break out.

What am I missing here? There must be something about the publishing industry I’m not getting that makes this sort of stunt impossible. For the life of me though, I can’t work it out. Explain to me what is going on, someone? Please?