FWIW, I once backed off publishing on Arxiv because their requirements for the exact format of my PDF were too restrictive. At the time I didn't feel stronly about it one way or the other, and if I was in the same situation maybe I'd persevere. But it would have taken an enormous amount of time to reformat my large and complicated PDF. I've heard the same complaint from others.

Some journals rules prohibit submitting to arxiv. Researchers still want to submit their research to these journals because they are prestigious. One of the main goals of researchers is prestige (for their work to be widely read, for getting grants, for attracting grad students and post doc laborers, etc.).

You need to upload the original tex and somehow it always took some tweaking to get it to compile relative to my local setup. But yes, it’s a low barrier.

In medicine/public health/etc. there are two reasons:

1) medRxiv was relatively new, and while the COVID-19 pandemic was its moment, there are a lot of concerns about pre-peer review stuff, and the public, press, etc. not treating it with appropriate caution.

2) Some journals heavily penalize or won't consider preprints, and some of these journals are quite good. This has gotten a little pushback recently as well.

Speaking as a biologist working in Australia:

1) Older collaborators with more power are being 'scared' of getting scooped when they post preprints. They're slowly coming around as the argument makes no real sense, preprint = published to the younger generation.

2) Funding bodies, i.e. the people who pay our bills and have all the power. The Australian Research Council, the biggest non-medical funding body here, does not allow mentions of preprints in grant applications. They give no reason for that rule.

3) Again, money. You want your research to go into the journal with the highest impact factor since that mostly decides whether you get to keep your job, get that new position, or get that grant. Some journals still don't allow preprints. You also get no feedback when a top journal rejects your paper, could the rejection be because others have seen your preprint, published papers built on top of the preprint, and now your paper submitted to the journal is not so novel any more? You have no way of telling.

4) Fear. Sometimes, after your paper has undergone peer review it's a little bit better. A few select people see the embarrassing errors in your paper and help you fix them before the paper is widely accessible. If you post a preprint the world sees your glaring errors.

That's why I think there's a chance for sci-hub to disrupt this. It's already doing great marketing-wise and attracting a lot of great researchers. If some of those researchers donate their research and their time to peer review - in protest against the current monopoly - it could be disrupted.

Point taken.

I think ultimately the problem of academia publication isn't the openness of access (which obviously is good if we can have), but the whole system as you mentioned.

> This makes it a fairly self-sustaining system. It also makes it hard to break into. It’s no coincidence that the “best” publications also tend to be the oldest.

I think that this is also means that it will be slow moving and very fragile to a new system that could incentivize people to undertake all the listed actions above that don't go thru/reliant upon the traditional process.

Not saying that we are there yet, nor do I think willingly choosing to submit to any particular jurisdiction in hopes of a favorable outcome will have much effect in the long run (I think systems really change when old systems that served similar functions in some capacity are made obsolete), but as long as tech becomes cheaper, more people become knowledge able about the system as a whole and the incentives involved, more ways of pursuing research will emerge that will be more resilient than hoping for nation state judiciary approval.

In what fields are you expected to publish your source code? In the fields I’ve interacted with it was always an “above and beyond” thing that nobody would raise an eye at you not doing.

That's not at all the same as the proposal I was replying to.

They seemed to be saying that people should only publish in Sci-Hub, making it a prestigious publication (that would appear in press releases, one assumes) instead of just a mirror.