I agree with you, you're absolutely correct. At this point, libraries and/or publishing divisions of major universities could easily collectively manage journals on an open access basis, with funding being supplied through academic societal membership dues. Journals do provide resources, like professional copyediting, submission and review portals, but my guess is this could be obtained through a more collaborative open-access mechanism, probably supplemented with some professional positions (e.g., someone in a department of communications or the university communications or library working as a professional editor).

Having said that, I absolutely do not believe the current structure has anything to do with journal lobbyists leaning on university political figures. I say this as someone who has served at an editor at multiple established journals in my field, who is on the editorial boards of a number of journals (incidentally, I know Eiko, the author of the blog post being discussed). Journals do put pressures on libraries, who have been in a sort of catch-22 with this stuff (this being a large topic for another thread maybe), but I don't think that's the major problem.

The major problem is the incentive structure around authoring papers and publishing. Contrary to what many might assume, publish or perish is not really the name of the game at big universities anymore — it's getting indirect grant funds. Papers in high IF journals matter, but it's secondary to grant funding, in the sense that papers are necessary to justify grant funding, which is what universities want.

The result of this is that the bottom is dropping out of publishing as a primary incentive at universities. There's just no (or little) incentive for faculty to take on editorial duties or do reviewing or anything. I've had colleagues who were involved in academic publishing, editing and reviewing, and were scolded by department heads who asked them "what kind of funds is this bringing in to the department?" Sometimes this comes with a position for a grad student or two to act as administrative assistants, but that's about it.

Major outlets like Nature often have professional editors (that is, editors who don't have academic positions elsewhere), which reflects this trend. It doesn't have to be this way, and the bulk of journals are run by academic editorial boards, but I think as you get into very high IF journals, you see things change.

The issue is this: if you tried to establish what you're talking about, if a large number of chief librarians at a large number of, say, US universities got together and said "we're going to run our own journals", I think university administrations at many universities would see this as a cost sink and nothing else.

I'm not sure exactly what the best way of explaining this is, but for many universities at the moment, papers and bibliometrics are kind of this superficial formality to justify the money that they require to produce (in terms of grants). That is, you don't get grants to publish an important finding, or to publish in Nature, you publish in Nature as a way of obtaining a grant, to bring in money. The goals, at least administratively, have shifted over time from create good ideas -> publish good ideas -> have publishing patterns that look like someone with good ideas -> have publishing patterns that look like good ideas in order to get grants -> get grants.

The discussions here and elsewhere that have the theme of "papers are easy to publish, why do we need journals" are implicitly recognized at universities now, in that no one administratively really cares about publishing. What they care about is grant income through indirect funds. If administrators could just get indirect funds without publishing, I think many of them wouldn't care. However, grant agencies care about them, and in the current climate, it's all about paper counts, IF, all these appearances of intellectual greatness -- all of that is the basis of grants and promotion. Without it, how would you be able to tell anything?

So basically the costs get offloaded onto journals, who essentially become credentialing organizations.

There's a lot to say about this, but the bottom is eroding out of academic publishing at the moment. Everyone wants the imprimatur of citation counts, publication counts, IFs, h factors, etc. but doesn't want to do the reviewing or pay for it. You can say that's good, and maybe it is -- I think academic publishing is not open access enough, and OA models have their own problems -- but the alternative everyone is hurtling toward is a system where it's all about the amount of federal money research brings in.

This is all tangential to what Eiko is talking about at some level, but I think coming from Eiko maybe not.