[Calloutman]

I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my papers from scihub. My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed my paper nothing. If I had stayed in academia (I didn't partially because of the toxic nature of publishing) I would also have been expected to peer review other journals for free. Information should be free access information general, but publishers are the least deserving key holders.

[matheusmoreira]

> My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed my paper nothing.

Why are these intermediaries still around? Peer review is the real value provided by a scientitic journal and the people who do that have no reason to be loyal to these companies since they don't get paid.

[dariosalvi78]

reputation. There are hundreds of publishers, but it takes time to build reputation. Unfortunately it's a chicken and egg problem, very hard to tackle, but some new publishers are slowly emerging. (Classic) scientific publishing is a giant monstrous stinking dinosaur. Everybody hates it and SciHub is doing its fair job of accelerating its death.

[contravariant]

At this point their main purpose is providing artificial scarcity, in the hopes that this increases the quality of the papers that do get published.

[DrAwdeOccarim]

It's a great question. Inertia/legacy is a big part. But you're seeing new journals pop up with heavy weight support (eLife, PLoS, etc.) that are getting cited more and becoming higher impact. You also now have pre-prints like Arxive and bioarxive. I guess the point is peer-review, modern science moves slow because it takes time to disrupt the trust people put in a Nature, Science, Cell, etc publication. Once higher impact papers start going to other journals, the pre-tenure profs will feel comfortable to follow.

[einpoklum]

> Why are these intermediaries still around?

Because publishing a decent journal - even online but certainly in the real world - involves a whole lot of work: Administrative, some technical, some networking, some advertizing, maintaining relations within the relevant fields etc. That's all when we ignore the peer review itself which requires domain expertise.

[dna_polymerase]

Personally I don’t see the quid pro quo nature of peer review (you review in return for your stuff being reviewed) as a problem. But I dislike the fact that the publishers limit access to something that others provided without compensation. Seriously their subscription models are outrageous, nothing they provide alongside the actual content makes it worth it.

[Calloutman]

You're still providing a valuable service for free. Why can't everyone get paid?

[azangru]

> I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my papers from scihub.

Out of curiosity: why don't you just host your papers on your website then - or, if you do, why don't you think it's enough?

[martin_vejmelka]

> why don't you just host your papers on your website then - or, if you do, why don't you think it's enough?

Most publishers prevented you from doing this as of a few years ago (I left academic research around that time). You were not allowed to post any content that contains any work by the publisher (even formatting/editing changes after first round of reviews). Thus you could only publish a "preprint" which no-one can rely on to cite because they don't know what's in the final peer-reviewed version. Some publishers are more lenient than others but there's definitely friction induced.

[jhrmnn]

I (not OP) do, https://jan.hermann.name/publications/ (note the copyright notices, required by the journals, which pop up when you hover of the pdf link [didn't figure out a good alternative on mobile]). In rare cases, the journals don't allow this at all, in some cases they allow you to self-publish only the submitted manuscript, before any modifications based on peer review.

As for why it's not enough—because hiring committees and funding agencies almost never take unpublished (that is, in a proper journal) manuscripts into account when evaluating you and your funding proposals. This is what needs to change in the first place to break the loop.

[lrem]

Many (most?) do, that's where Google Scholar took its PDFs from pre-scihub.

[gewa]

Im not sure if it's legally flawless to upload the published journal article to your Website and open it up to the public. As far as i know, you're only allowed to pass it on a personal, per-request basis. This explicitly refers to the final peer reviewed article and not to the manuscript, which can make a great difference.

[vasili111]

>If I had stayed in academia (I didn't partially because of the toxic nature of publishing)

Which country are you from? Where are you now, in industry? Is there less toxic environment than in academia?

[refurb]

Are you planning to publish all of your own papers in open access journals? That would be putting your money where your mouth is.

I’ve seen plenty of researchers say “information should be free” and then later publish everything in closed journals because the open access ones have low impact factor.

Seems hypocritical to me.

[SeanAppleby]

When you say "low impact factor", you're referring to a combination of lack of prestige and lack of readership that leads to few citations and subsequently little influence on the field, right?

If so, why is the prestigious curation of the journal that leads academics to reading your paper and taking it seriously inextricably tied to whether or not it's behind a paywall at all?

What's stopping someone from building an alternative curation pipeline on top of open access journals that gives academics equal or better signal/noise to the journals they read, and a similar socially accepted prestige for getting into that curation pipeline?

I get that there's not a clear path to monetization, but maybe it's possible, particularly if you could execute more targeted curation for academic subfields that are too small to have their own journals, that you could find some donors and lean on academics supporting the curation process themselves out of their seeming discontent with publishing to drive down costs.