The publishing companies do not create anything of value, they hold a resource (prestige) that they do nothing to improve, transform or grow. Academies do all that labour for free, and the publishers rent-seek on that free labour and run a racket ("publish here or else").
It's a feudal setup: a king controls the land but does nothing with it. The serfs do all the labour and then pay the king for "access" to the land.
they hold a resource (prestige) that they do nothing to improve, transform or grow
That's absolutely untrue. A journals prestige is not a given. It has to be maintained and I know of at a couple journals that have fallen out of favor.
The editorial board makes decisions on which papers to publish, and it's that track record that maintains the level of prestige. They also have to get peer reviewers (nobody will waste their time reviewing for a no-name journal) of a certain caliber to review.
it better to think of the journals as more similar to a luxury good - the value is not in the work done or how much it costs, but the perceived value of other people.
That has real value, and it's clearly apparent people are willing to pay for it.
Yes it is, but why hasnt it changed in the past 30 years? Because the serfs (academics) cannot agree on a replacement ruler. It's not like there arent many good open access publishers. But there aren't many open 'prestige givers'
I'd argue that it has changed quite dramatically in the last 30 years. As you say, there are now many great open access publishers. That wasn't nearly so established 30 years ago. Paid access journals haven't died yet, but they're well on their way.
In my former university, the people in power hasn't changed in the past 30 years. So worshiping the big publishers is still the norm and it takes a while for new students to detach themselves from their supervisors' delusions and realize the whole scam.
The interesting question is: Is there a quasi-monopolistic predatory exploitation of a historically captive market? And what are the mechanisms to destroy it?
From my perspective, it's clear that we have a multi-billion dollar/year heist by corporations whose value proposition (logistics, layout, quality assurance) are quickly eroding. They need to die yesterday.
Unfortunately, in this regard what you pay for isn't what it seems. There's a reason that machine learning is moving fast as a field, and that is because for this field academic discourse happens primarily through pre-prints and conferences. This would stop if discourse moved to publishing via journals. This is because the publishing system is cripplingly slow, exploitative, and a perverse shadow of what it was supposed to grow to become.
