To stay obvious, what’s fascinating is that those networks are small, its members the most intelligent people available and they meet each other regularly in person at conferences.
Not every community does it this way. For example, computational linguistics put most of their conference proceedings online for free: https://aclanthology.org/. Deep learning researchers just publish a lot of stuff to arxiv.
Academic publishers like Elsevier are predatory scammers.
To stay obvious, what’s fascinating is that those networks are small, its members the most intelligent people available and they meet each other regularly in person at conferences.
Why do they accept the lock-in?
Not every community does it this way. For example, computational linguistics put most of their conference proceedings online for free: https://aclanthology.org/. Deep learning researchers just publish a lot of stuff to arxiv.
Academic publishers like Elsevier are predatory scammers.