How many scientist agree that people who access there's paper should pay ~$30 ?
edit: Nothing wrong with volunteering to review research, but if the whole process is for-profit, I don't understand why the reviewers cannot be compensated for their effort.
Another point - journals never charge to publish (conferences do).
I have the proofs of my papers, but I cannot access them online anymore.
https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-your-...
Also Taylor & Francis may have decent journals in some niches but generally aren't a great publisher.
a. far from ubiquitous
b. often include provisions created by the publisher designed to make discoverability outside of the journal difficult
The editor invites domain experts to review manuscripts. By compensating the reviewers it does not mean that you suddenly get more domain experts. Same people will be invited. But they will be compensated by taking a cut of the publisher's profits.
Or we can cut the middle men and publish in community maintained non-profit open-access journals.
Why is this not a solution?
The trick is to kick out out the for-profit middlemen who are taking advantage of the prestige and impact that various journals built over time, and now they just receive paychecks and free labor.
[1] https://authorservices.wiley.com/author-resources/Journal-Au...
Beyond that, the best journals in your field may not be open access. In my sub-specialty, none of them are.
This statement makes me think you significantly misunderstand how scientists / universities function. The scientists (graduate students, postdocs, professors, staff) are all salaried employees of the university. The university does take some of the grant money given to lead professors (e.g. to pay the aforementioned salaries).
If someone were to snap their fingers tomorrow and make it so that scientists could publish their work without having to deal with these for-profit publishers, universities would save millions of dollars (per school), taxpayers would save money, and the general public would also have greater access to the work that they themselves funded through public grants.
[1] https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-uc-split-pub...
There was also a big fight over prices with Nature about 10 years ago.
Universities rarely tell scientists where to publish. That is determined by the scientists, the quality of the paper and the editor of the journal.
Scientists and PhD students need to publish in high impact factor journals for their work to be recognized, for promotions, graduation, etc. There is a lot of work that goes into a scientific publication. It's not a blog (which most people equate it to when they say why isn't it free).
Scientists can make their publications available on their personal website. Generally google scholar will give you a pdf if its available. Some labs maintain papers on their site, other scientists don't. Generally, finding older publications is a challenge.
I've commented on this earlier. Asking the researcher to not publish in these journals is pointless. You need to legislate access. But in general, most scientists will have access to these journals from their university libraries (at least in US/Canada/Europe).
I've never encountered a mandate to publish in certain journals because the university has contracts with them. On occasion there are incentives like breaks on open access fees essentially because the university pre-paid, and there are field specific norms on where to publish.