Very true, this is precisely the problem. Editors don't leave E's journals' boards because it might hurt their vitae. Referees don't decline to work for E's journals (for free) because it might hurt their relations with editors. And authors often don't have much choice where to send their articles and might hurt their career by picking out-of-stream venues.
> Recently, I wanted to read a quite old paper as it connected to my recent research. It was published in the 60s, in a journal that has housed some extremely ground breaking work in my field. But you wouldn’t get that impression from their elsevier site
The OP is describing how all journals are treated the same, despite the the fact that they are essentially mini societies, some with more important histories than others
All articles are already assured to get salvaged via services like LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, and Portico. All we need is to have them go bankrupt, preferably fully, so stories like that won't repeat: https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues/22
Of course they won't do it as that would show the world the other 99% of their journals are in fact old rubbish. And they don't buy us drinks as we know...
> Then when I submit they'll "proofread" and "format" my paper, failing to spot existing errors, introducing their own, and outputting an ugly mess, maybe with two columns to make it really unreadable.
We have been recording their (dis)services here, with everyone warmly welcome to add more:
