> It is more a question as to why scholarly societies are still organized around paid journals.
There are some perverse incentives in place that hinder migrating away from official journals. The publish or perish pressure leads only high-quality work to count, and the method used to objectively determine if a paper meets the bar is whether it was accepted in established journals. New journals do not have the reputation in place, thus they don't feature in lists of acceptable publications for the purpose of gathering publication metrics. In some places some of these rules applied to state institutions are even set by laws, which are hard to change.
On top of that, some journals are even controlled by leading researchers, which helps building up influence in the field.
To put it plainly, why would any researcher go the extra mile to switch publications?
There are some perverse incentives in place that hinder migrating away from official journals. The publish or perish pressure leads only high-quality work to count, and the method used to objectively determine if a paper meets the bar is whether it was accepted in established journals. New journals do not have the reputation in place, thus they don't feature in lists of acceptable publications for the purpose of gathering publication metrics. In some places some of these rules applied to state institutions are even set by laws, which are hard to change.
On top of that, some journals are even controlled by leading researchers, which helps building up influence in the field.
To put it plainly, why would any researcher go the extra mile to switch publications?