Ok I’ll bite. How should journals be structured financially? https://twitter.com/aaberhe/status/1331255302054760448

The old model was essentially a consortium model. All the universities agreed to pay the crazy subscription fees and all the students and staff got to read the papers. But distribution got cheaper (digital) & the research community got more democratized (smaller institutions)

So now the huge subscription fees (originally understood to be paid for by universities and corporate research labs) were considered exclusionary. Which of course they were.

So now we try charging to publish. Which creates incentives so crazy I can’t believe they’re proposing them. Not to mention still being exclusionary. But at the end of the day it seems people still find the imprimatur meaningful.

So if research is decoupling from the university (wow!) then how does this gate keeping and journaling function get paid for? Government funding? Still universities because they benefit from the larger community?

I suppose another answer is “screw it, we don’t need the gatekeeping at all, it’ll sort itself out on the Internet” that may lose a long term risk as “published” papers come and go as the vicissitudes of fashion and tech change the forums they’re published in.