The term “open access” is misleading and carefully engineered to generate good will, when in fact it should be termed “pay to publish” (as argued quite nicely by Brian McGill [1]). As it stands today, OA is mostly a public money sink, a big scheme to drain public money from European countries. Not only are we paying a ridiculous, ungodly amount of money for people to host PDFs on a website, but the entire idea of publishers competing for the quality of their research output (in order to get submissions) has also basically been eradicated and turned meaningless. Reviewers are pushed to accept papers instead of rejecting them, because a rejected paper makes no money, and now we are left with a deluge of noise that passes for scientific literature. I sincerely pity the PhD student who needs to run a serious, systematic literature review in 2024. Hell sounds more attractive.
If you want open access, ditch the publishers and fund volunteer expert communities to edit and publish their own papers. You can’t have the cake and eat it too.
If you want open access, ditch the publishers and fund volunteer expert communities to edit and publish their own papers. You can’t have the cake and eat it too.
[1] https://dynamicecology.wordpress.com/2024/04/29/the-state-of...