How, and why, is such a business model still working? The only scenario I can think of is when an independent researcher wants to publish his/her research to disseminate to a wider audience and invite critiques. Or, is that also possible without these publishers?
1. Reputation. Journals are a provider, mainly, of a note saying "this paper is worth reading". This reputation is calculated largely by how much the papers they publish get cited later on. Due to the speed of iterations of science (how long it takes for a published paper to be used in more work, and then that new work to be published) it takes a long time to get past this.
2. Organised peer review. Despite the reviewers working for free, it's still not a free process. There's a great twitter thread about this from someone at peerJ (founder?) but I can't find a link now.
Getting more and more common is to pay the publisher and have the work made openly available, or at least to deposit the work in an institutional repository.
[disclaimer, I work in the science & publishing area for Digital Science, but on analysis of data not the publishing itself]
Each individual researcher wants their work published in as high-impact paper as possible. Individually fighting against the very publisher you want to publish your work with is harmful to your career and will accomplish exactly nothing.
It takes a critical mass of researchers, acting in coordinated way, for the attempt to change things not be suicidal.
This is really the point. It's the tragedy of the commons. It needs coordination - sometimes it happens. Don Knuth managed to wrangle the Journal of Algorithms from Elsevier, but not all fields have such an engaged Nestor that puts in the work to pull this off.
I'm not really easily angered, but Elsevier (and, to a lesser extent, the other scientific publishers) are really despicable, earning above-market returns on equity off the labour of (publicly funded) scientists, then spending some of that money to make it harder to access the (publicly funded) research.
Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum.
Read the longest section of the Wikipedia entry on Elsevier ("Criticism"), and weep.
But researchers always want to disseminate their work to a wide audience (of other scientists that will cite their work and thus help them get a long-term job).
How, and why, is such a business model still working? The only scenario I can think of is when an independent researcher wants to publish his/her research to disseminate to a wider audience and invite critiques. Or, is that also possible without these publishers?