Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

That's the problem, they don't hate these journals, they love them. Generally speaking they're old people who became influential by publishing in these journals. Their reputation and influence was built on a pile of Science and Nature papers. Their presentations all include prominent text indicating which figures came from luxury journals. If Science and Nature lose their prestige so do they (or at least that's what they think)

This was very apparent when eLife changed their publishing model. Their was a big outpouring of rage from older scientists who had published in eLife when it was a more standard "high impact" journal. Lots of "you're ruining your reputation and therefore mine".

Because someone is surely going to try to defend journals via peer review in this thread, I want to provide a counter to the arguments that journal peer review does much good. Also, since everyone knows that if you just go to a poor enough journal, you can be published, I am going to focus on the (IMO mostly false) claim that higher-profile journals are still doing a good thing here.

There are numerous studies showing that higher-profile journals in general have more retractions and research misconduct [1-2], lower research quality [3], in fact weaker statistical power and reliability [4], and that statistical reliability even in high prestige journals is still extremely poor overall [5]. Also, making it through peer review is highly random and dependent on who you get as a reviewer [6], or is just basically a coin toss even when looking at reviewer groups:

    In 2014, 49.5% of the papers accepted by the first committee were rejected by the second (with a fairly wide confidence interval as the experiment included only 116 papers).  This year, this number was 50.6%.  We can also look at the probability that a randomly chosen rejected paper would have been accepted if it were re-reviewed.  This number was 14.9% this year, compared to 17.5% in 2014. [7]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3187237/

[2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1212247109

[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9382220/

[4] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...

[5] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...

[6] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...

[7] https://blog.neurips.cc/2021/12/08/the-neurips-2021-consiste...

Except it was…? This is absurdly ahistorical and the fact that you cross disciplines in trying to make an incorrect argument questions whether you are in science at all.

The structure of peer review in Darwin’s time was different, where experts wrote monographs and gave lectures at symposia that then led to letters among their peers. Which is what happens now, if you take a step back.

The volume of new work these days is incompatible with the older informal system, and is in some ways our new paradigm is superior as there is a formal period in which new works are reviewed.

No actual working scientist thinks this.

“Glitchc” has it right elsewhere in this thread: the motivating force behind journals is prominence and reputation, not truth.

I think it’d be a big ask from someone whose role doesn’t typically cover that sort of decision.