The Internet revolution never truly arrived in scientific publishing. Instead, an old system that was functional in its time was scaled up in a largely cargo-cult manner, producing today’s grotesque, dysfunctional, and extraordinarily expensive publishing ecosystem.
Most scientists tolerate this absurdity because they are insulated from its costs. First, they learn to accept the dysfunction as the inevitable “cost of doing business.” Second, universities pay the subscription bills, so individual researchers working there rarely feel the price and paywalled gatekeeping directly.
Clearly the current publishing model is utterly dysfunctional. The best way to see that is to ask the following question. If the current system is thrown away, and the scientists gather to create a brand new system for publishing, will they build a replica of the current model? Will they beg the journal companies to lock up their papers in exchange for free work of writing, editing, reviewing and most importantly doing the entire research?
