You confuse two things. The main career goal of a researcher in academia is generally moving up to the tenure track. The method to measure this progress is typically a)publication in journals with a high impact factor and b) Being on the technical review committee of said journals.

The reason researchers publish in these journals is it gives them street cred. There are several open access journals - but scanty participation since their impact factor is unknown and does little to promote the researchers career.

Speaking as someone who has published myself, the paywalls are highway robbery. But, imho - it is a problem only the researchers can solve by concertedly supporting open access journals and getting involved in them (maybe a yc research idea???). The established professors would need to take the lead on this - not the underlings.

Personally - I've seen the "light" and stayed back in industry as opposed to moving into academia as I had hoped. The rat race for funding & publications & street cred seemed a lot worse there.

Another important reason for slow adoption of open access is that most open access journals charge significant publication fees ($1000 or more.) Most academic labs run on shoestring budgets, so that's a lot of money. The principal investigator has to choose between standing on principle and publishing open access, or paying for equipment and reagents or sending students to conferences. That's not an easy choice to make, especially pre-tenure.

Agreed - that's a good point. In fact Elsevier has caught on to this as well. I remember when I published with them they gave me an option of making my paper open access if I paid somewhere around $1000 (or maybe it was $3000). I ignored that option. I agree there are costs - typesetting (well - I did send a LaTeX manuscript), etc. but not $1000 worth. If they'd said $100 - now I would have definitely considered the open access path.

Their re-typesetting your articles can just be pure grief, too.

For the last journal article I published, in a journal run by Springer, we submitted a nicely typeset LaTeX article using the template they provided.

Our best theory is that they then copy/pasted the result into Word. It came back to us as a "pre-print" PDF with tons of errors, font changes, etc. We had no good way to compare it to the original other than printing them both out and going through, line by line, looking for discrepancies. There were dozens and dozens of problems. And it was a 70 page article!

After sending them corrections we got to repeat this process 3 times.

And now they charge folks for our article.

Fuck. :(

I'm sure nobody would ever blame you if the original typeset paper were to suddenly land on Sci-Hub.

But seriously, what you're basically saying here is that in fact it would have been better to have published it yourself - except you may not have had the same audience who would have known about the paper?

Or did they also go through rounds of peer review and ask for clarification or find errors?

Because they can and academic scientists don't do anything to change the status quo.

That's a bit harsh--many academic scientists can't do much to change the status quo. I would love to submit to open access journals, but I also really like eating, having a place to sleep, and other indulgences that having a job provides.

As a grad student, one basically doesn't have much say. Postdocs have a bit more latitude, but need to "play the game" to land jobs; pre-tenure faculty are in a very similar position if they want to keep theirs. Even tenured PIs are in a pretty precarious position: many are on soft-money positions (no grants, no salary), all of them need grants, and their trainees also presumably want to move up the grad student -> postdoc -> faculty ladder.

Getting this to change is a massive collective action problem and it's really going to need a push from institutions and the big names at the very top. This holds not just for publications, but a lot of other issues with academia too. I'd love to spend more time making our code solid and publicly available, but there's essentially no payoff for that either.

I wouldn't say scientists are doing nothing. See for instance the "Cost of Knowledge" project spearheaded by top mathematicians: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge

Not much seeing much output from that initiative which I signed btw.

Who gets paid more: a tenure track professor doing research or an Associate Dean for Research?

This is the same phenomenon.