the current journal system works like this:
- the govt (i.e. taxpayers) and universities pay for research to be done
- once the research is done, the universities pay journals to review and publish their work
- the journals then get academics to review the work
- the journals do not pay the reviewers for this
- the journals then charge exorbitant fees for the universities and members of the public to view the work that they as a collective paid for
- from which exactly none of those fees go back to the original creators or funders of the research
-- so in conclusion, the journals get paid from both sides, supplier and consumer, at no point paying anything to the funders or creators of their product, except perhaps in tax. their sole costs are administrative, and maybe some printing, if they even still bother to do that
these institutions deserve to die. they are cancerous parasites leeching the veins of science, extracting money at every opportunity, taking funding from research, all for the sake of a service that can largely be boiled down to prestige for a price
>if journals ceased to exist tomorrow I doubt anyone here would volunteer to do the task of what the journals do now
this simply isn't true. there is a growing movement where academics do this very thing, founding their own fairer journals that aren't owned by Elsevier