Comment by pedrobeltrao

Scientists still publish Elsevier because of the so called "impact factor" of some of these journals. As a young researcher currently looking for tenure-track positions in academia I can tell you that it is still extremely important to publish in some of these journals (ex Cell). Unfortunately there are still very few (or none) open access journals that have the same perceived impact. I try to publish in PLoS journals or other open access journals as much as I can but given the chance to publish in higher impact journals I have to take it or risk not having a job in the future. Once you have the job you need to secure funding and so there is always pressure to publish in the "best" possible journal. The ridiculous thing about this situation is that would be fairly easy to create a new open access and highly prestigious journal in any field if everyone would switch to publishing in these new journals at the same time. You would probably just need to convince some of the leaders in the field to do it. This was how PLoS was born in fact. Unfortunately for the PhD students and postdocs it is hard to do anything about it.