From an article by Justin Fox over at Bloomberg View:
[Academic] journals are getting more and more selective as time goes by. According to Glenn Ellison of MIT ...the average acceptance rate at the top general-interest economics journals has declined from 18 percent in 1980 to about 6 percent now.
This trend will be familiar to anyone who has looked at admission rates to top universities. Despite ever-rising tuition costs and the growth of much-cheaper online alternatives, the highest-status universities keep getting more selective. The best way to understand this, I think, is to see both academic journals and top universities less as purveyors of information or knowledge than as dispensers of status. Information may want to be free, but status will always be scarce.