Support and enforce open access publishing

Driven by academic performance criteria, researchers feel forced to publish their work in high-impact journals, owned by evil publishers.

Why are these publishers evil?

They are evil because they do not pay researchers for publishing with them (in fact, researchers are generally paid with public money), yet charge ludicrous amounts to either those who want to read a paper ($30 is no exception), or to those who want their paper published as open access (think $2000).

They are evil because they gain copyright over all work that was published, and use this copyright to hide this work from the public; they send threatening letters to researchers that put draft versions of their papers on their personal websites so everyone can read them.

They are evil because they are irresponsibly driven by concerns for profitability rather than the progress of science. This is unethical.

They are evil because more and more institutions cannot or will not pay the ludicrous fees imposed by publishers. Therefore, less and less researchers can base their research on a decent literature study. Research that is done without a decent literature study is not decent and potentially even harmful. This was a major problem in developing countries already, and is now becoming a problem in richer countries as well. The consequences of publishers' unethical practices are dire.

What can we do?

Two things.

First, as explained in the article linked below, a single researcher, fed up with the fact that she literally could not afford a decent literature study, created a system that gives researchers free access to research papers that are paywalled by publishers. She's now being sued by Elsevier for causing millions of damage to them. Support her cause, and if she gets convicted, keep her initiative alive. Also, stop publishing with Elsevier, quite possibly the most unethical publisher in the business, charging the highest amounts and being the most aggressive in requesting the removal of paywalled material from public access.

Second, even though the unethical practices of academic publishers are clearly the biggest threat to scientific progress, performance measurements at universities empower this threat by expecting researchers to publish in certain journals, belonging to publishers that are unethical. Fellow authors, demand to be allowed to publish in free open access media. The academic publishing system must change. If your performance reviews depend on your publications behind paywalls, start petitioning, picketing, or whatever you need to do to make your institution realize that it is contributing to the absolute and utter failure of the scientific system.

Link: https://bigthink.com/neurobonkers/a-pirate-bay-for-science