Scientific publication is broken but honestly I doubt that’s the reason science itself is broken. Before the advent of the internet you had access to the journals in your library and pretty much that’s it. If you wanted any other reference you had to do an ILL. Or write to the authors and wait for months. People obviously did great amazing science, much better than what’s being done today.

I used to live in a third world country where access to articles was abysmal (pre scihub) and honestly that was like the 10th biggest problem I had with doing good science. If you’re smart and you want to learn something you will find a way. Money is not the same thing, and neither are ideas. You can’t just will your way to those things.

Again, I am happy scihub exists and support it fully, but that’s honestly not solving the real problem with science.

Maybe I should've been more clear that it is one of the problems that need to be solved. "Solving publishing is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to fix science as a system."

There's still room for disagreement here ofc, but at least that should make my point clear. :)

Everyone is already free to publish their work on the Internet. Not sure if the publishing model by itself is the core issue, or the science funding model at large. A symptom is the fetishisation of peer review as a gatekeeping mechanism, which I think is what you decry. Peer review is driven by the need of funding agencies to have some roughly objective criteria for personnel selection. Publish or perish. While it is not an ideal tool, I have a hard time coming up with a better alternative.

Fundamentally science is about creating models of the world that are independently verifiable through experiment. Peer review inhabits an uncomfortable middle ground. While it serves a positive function in checking for methodological issues, it is only a distant proxy for independent experiments and is often prone to authority and group think.