Building a Better Landscape for Research Dissemination

Let’s take a moment to think about where we’ve come to in scientific publishing. Once upon a time, journals and their publishers played an absolutely critical role in science’s growth and successes. Many journal publishers are for-profit enterprises, and they still want to make profits even if they no longer serve an important purpose. By controlling the information, they can still force people to pay for services that are obsolete and manipulate the system in ways that stymie progress to maintain their market. Open access did not have the power to change this. Altogether, things are in bad shape. I think that in these cases, it’s useful to think about what the perfect utopian system would be as a starting place. Then, you can plan realistic steps to move from our poor system to a better one. This isn’t something that happens overnight, but we’re at a point where we need a direction to move in.