I think medium had the right idea but I don't think the business model was really solid. Substack got it right: people want to pay creators to write, not a company to broker access to creators. Instead of pivoting, they seemed to double down.

Why aren't science journals the same? Why do I still have to pay some middle man?

I don't know. I'm not in academia or doing research, but from the outside looking it, it seems like a racket.

I'm in academia and doing research.

It's a racket.

My high level speculation is curation. There actually is (or should be?) some sort of peer review system by people for that journal. That labor is valuable.

Also, simple grandfathering. I imagine once upon a time Science journals was a literal term. Easier to keep the same hook if your users were used to it in another medium.

As someone else mentioned, the labor is typically free. It's done by volunteers for various reasons (including, but not limited to, prestige ... literally working for exposure).

Also note that publishing to a particular high-profile comp sci journal tends to cost on the order of 1000 EUR (last I checked, a few years ago), more if you want it to be open/public access.

In other words, journals will:

- Charge hundreds to thousands of EUR to authors (typ. indirectly, by charging their university) in order to publish papers.

- Charge hundreds of EUR (at best) per year to readers for access to said papers.

- Not pay reviewers for the work in reviewing the papers.

It's literally just glorified super-expensive webhosting.

It is actually very rare to pay the reviewers. The standard is that peer review process is done by senior scientists as volunteers.

There was a time when it made sense to have both done by the same entity. Time for a devorce. One does the work the other collects the reward??

Because academics care more about which journal a paper is published in, rather than the content of the paper.