Reputation. The publishers aren&#x27;t just printing presses. They own  journals that have gained reputation over decades and serve as a measure of a paper&#x27;s strength. There are so many papers being published that researchers can&#x27;t possibly read them all (even in their own field), so they rely on a &quot;caste system&quot; of journals to rate them. For this system to be trustworthy, journals need to undergo the slow, often self-reinforcing, process of building reputation over time.<p>Of course, the editors of those journals could try to switch to another form of publishing, but they can&#x27;t take the journal&#x27;s name with them, and the move would require guts that, unless many do it, may not be justified. Think about it this way: the entire faculty of Harvard can decide to move to a no-name university, but the name Harvard alone would still carry a lot of weight, and every professor who stays behind lowers the effectiveness of the move considerably.