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fdefittetoday at 9:03 PM1 replyview on HN

One cartel gone, incentive structure intact. Academic prestige is entirely mediated through journal placement, so whoever controls prestige journals can extract rents indefinitely. Elsevier did not invent this, they just ran it more aggressively.

The fix is not enforcement. It is tenure committees that stop treating impact factors as proxies for researcher quality. Until that changes, any successor recreates the same behavior. The cartel is a symptom.


Replies

HPsquaredtoday at 9:08 PM

It's as if they have captured the most significant nodes on the map. Or were these prestige journals built up under the same system?