[bocklund]

Think of it from the scientist’s perspective. You can’t ignore the work in journals who have business models and policies you do not agree with.

Pretending research doesn’t exist slows progress and it is anti-science to put your head in the sand because you don’t agree with the location that knowledge was published in.

If you did read the papers in journals you don’t agree with, built on their ideas and didn’t cite them, then you just committed plagiarism and obscured the scientific record.

The “link to the PDF of the author’s homepage” trick doesn’t work because eventually that page will go away, as we have seen over and over in the age of the web. Part of the value journals add is promising to archive the work _forever_. They don’t promise it will be free forever (or at all) - which is what needs to change.

The answer isn’t to “not cite”, but to not publish there in the first place. That takes systemic change. Change of both the incentives: “how do I get promomoted?” or, fundamentally: “how do I make an impact and measure it?”. Citations are the de facto standard right now. It will change when we can measure impact (and get more promotions, grants, etc.) in a way that doesn’t favor the richest journals getting richer.