Just to make sure I read this correctly: Are you saying that, when judging by paper quality, there are only 500 good scientists on Earth?
The equation today isn't the same - with open source / community effort, I suspect the cost/effort of publication today doesn't even come close.
I was just randomly looking at what it would cost (rough estimate) for 25TB of S3 storage - 2,000,000 put requests a month, 2,000,000 get requests, 25TB bandwidth OUT and 25TB bandwidth IN - and it's less than $3,500 per month. So the cost of hosting the published item seems actually quite reasonable... reducing the cost of the rest of the "publication" plumbing are problems that technology also helps address.
Late addition: The cost of distribution of a scientific journal in electronic format is minuscule - put it on a blog. Medium.com is free.
Another addition: I have seen a few of the author contacts. All of the ones that I saw said the author could publish his original manuscript on the web to free. The author could just not publish the result of the publisher's processing of the manuscript. Someone should ask the authors why aren't they publishing their original submissions.
"The annual budget for arXiv is approximately $826,000 for 2013 to 2017, funded jointly by Cornell University Library, the Simons Foundation (in both gift and challenge grant forms) and annual fee income from member institutions."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv
> Medium.com is free.
Until its not, or until, as a commercial enterprise, Medium decides to completely pivot, or decides a controversial paper is too much bad publicity. If I publish to Medium, will future researchers be able to find my article in 10 years? In 50? Also I don't see how you've taken peer review into account here.
That said, Wikipedia mostly works. Between professional editors and the community, decent knowledge is categorized, edited/peer-reviewed and interlinked. Why the same cannot be done with academic papers is beyond me, other than to assume people simply don't want to change the status quo.
I also agree with your last point - so long as authors can contractually publish their own work, they should - and the Internet should make it as easy as humanely possible. I've published a paper before to an academic journal and had that clause, and then put it online on my own site as well (until I took my site down).
Random thing - I do think the standards of what constitutes knowledge matter, but boy do we hold them so high. I think there are many forms knowledge comes in, and expecting them to all be polished perfection is perhaps too lofty a goal. Knowledge is always a work in progress. Discerning between fact and fiction is the same whether you have a polished paper or a garbage one, it's just one is a lot easier to consume and you have more trust inherent by the nature of the reputation associated with the publisher, author, citations, etc.
This is an exceptionally incorrect statement to make. The other points are fine, which only makes it more baffling you would make this point.
- outside top 500 scientists across all the fields combined no one produces quality papers.
- the manuscripts received by EICs are garbage. EICs themselves rarely touch anything, or edit anything.
- "peer review" process in all non-the-most-upper-tier publication is a joke.
- copy-editing and proofreading is non-existent.
About 15 years ago a lot of journals that are now owned by the major publishers were society publications. This means that societies owned the title, owned the copyright and owned the process. Societies could not find people capable and willing to run a journal for $5k or so a paper including distribution and printing. So the societies went to the likes of Springer, Informa, T&F, Elsevier etc. Those said "Ok, sure. $2k per paper and we produce and distribute it or $5k per paper and we do everything". That was too much for societies. Instead the societies said said "Hey, what if we sold you the rights to the journal? Would you in that case do all of it for free, and let our EIC suck his or her thumb while still being the man/woman on the title page?" "Of course" said the publishers.
And so now we are here. Production costs did not go down. Distribution costs did not go down. In fact, distribution costs increased because before that the journals were printed by a little printers in the US as the volume of most of journals is microscopic ( later printing went to China in the same microscopic quantities ). Now, however, journals also need to be distributed in all kinds of wacky XML formats on all stages of production, which needs to be coded, in most cases by hand.
So unless every Joe, Jack and Jill, the scientist, wants to go back into the publishing world nothing is going to change.
[Source: pillow talk]