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It's Time For Academics To Take Back Control Of Research Journals (theguardian.com)
Stephen Curry, a professor of structural biology at Imperial College London, has a piece on The Guardian today in which he outlines the history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research. An excerpt from the article: "Publish or perish" has long been the mantra of seeking to make a success of their research career. Reputations are built on the ability to communicate something new to the world. Increasingly, however, they are determined by numbers, not by words, as universities are caught in a tangle of management targets composed of academic journal impact factors, university rankings and scores in the government's research excellence framework. The chase for metricised success has been further exacerbated by the takeover of scholarly publishing by profit-seeking commercial companies, which pose as partners but no longer seem properly in tune with academia. Evidence of the growing divergence between academic and commercial interests is visible in the secrecy around negotiations on subscription and open access charges. It's also clear from the popularity among academics of the controversial site Sci-Hub, which has made over 60m research articles freely available on the internet. Over-worked researchers could be forgiven for thinking that the time-honoured mantra has morphed to "publish, and perish anyway."
Scientific Publishing is, largely, about brownie points, rather than communication.
We get forced to use publishers because that's how we are judged; it's not a question of whether the publishers are doing anything actually useful.
To get funding (from government or industry) you need to be able to show how good you are. Current metrics are based on number of journal publication and rank of journals published in. Unfortunately for largely historical reasons the high rank journals tend to be the expensive walled gardens. No funding = no job = even less income than the pittance you currently survive off. That's a pretty strong incentive to play nice with the status quo.
Obviously this has to change (and I suspect it will), but it's non-trivial to change it. The people who set the rules (and often make funding choices) are the so-called "leaders in the field" who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and outsiders who seek guidance from same.
The issue here is less about greedy journals and more about the fact that universities are being run like businesses which results in the "publish or perish" expectation. The system has become completely mismanaged into being a capitalist nightmare where you do what they want or you lose what you love. I believe this could be remedied if it became exceptionally difficult to revoke tenure, requiring that colleagues agree to it. The greedy journals problem can easily be done away with by freely releasing the research and only allowing non-profit journals to publish their work.
TL;DR: The problem is the culture of university administrations, not with the researchers themselves.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Sci-Hub is not the solution. The issue is twofold: First, scientists (still) believe they must publish; they don't -- do achieve something in your field of research, and the world will know.
It is the new researchers who need to publish. Yes, once you've established a reputation in your field, people will know who you are. But that very often takes decades. Until then, you need publications to show you have a track record of good work.
(And even then, the reputation is usually phrased in terms of what you published: "e.g., "X published one of the seminal papers on bismith selenide semiconductors." And it will be two decades between when you published your paper and when the rest of the world starts putting bismuth selenide in their high-end devices.)
I mean, really, why do they need them?
You publish in the journal where your work will get read (and hopefully cited). If you publish in a top tier journal, like Science or Nature, then every working scientist will at least read the title in their weekly Table of Contents email. If you publish in a highly regarded specialist journal, then most of the people in your field will read the abstract. My highest cited paper was rejected by Science because the topic wasn't of "general interest to the scientific community", but it has 230 citations in an impact factor 4 journal because it was useful for researchers in my field.
But if you dump your paper in an open source journal (like PLOS ONE) nobody is going to bother reading it because PLOS ONE publishes 20,000 papers a year with no filter on quality or content.