[andre3k1]

The market for the distribution of peer-reviewed academic journals fascinates me. It is ripe for disruption.

More often than not, the content that gets published is created by the same institutions that are forced to pay for Elsevier's services. Elsevier acts as the middleman. Institutions pay academics to produce journal articles. After production and peer-review, ownership of the scholarly work is transferred over to a publisher. The institution must then pay to reacquire the same content they helped produce. In the past this made sense as distribution involved printing and mailing thousands of pages worth of journal articles. Nowadays everything is digital, which negates the publisher's purpose.

There is a burgeoning movement toward open access journals. More info on the subject available here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serials_crisis

[bgilroy26]

Is really ripe for disruption? I would think that if it was very ripe that the arXiv would serve a broader purpose than it currently does.

The problem is a social one -- academics want to post their work to well respected journals, because the respect is the currency that their future career advancement runs on.

A market is ripe for disruption when every stakeholder except the entrenched competition wants the product to be different AND that difference is readily available through low-cost solutions.

Typically the new, low-cost solutions that haven't already been tried, are only recently available through new technology.

Given the maturity of the market and the social nature of the business, (even considering how squeaky clean arXiv's brand is versus Paypal's) I think the same people who aren't very excited about putting arXiv papers on their CV are those who would never dream of taking their money out of a big, traditional bank.

Even though all of their money is digital, etc.