Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

Journals are an academic-career-advancement service. It therefore makes sense that they do not pay academics. You don't pay your customers.

That means they need to generate a secondary customer base elsewhere, who will pay. Those secondary customers happen to be the employers of the academics who are the primary customers. That socializes the cost of providing the service, since academics individually wouldn't be willing and able to pay.

Once journals have established a reputation, their policies and paywalls and fees are the result of trying to signal exclusivity and set an optimum market price.

Until the supply side of the research market largely agrees on a way to use open-access repositories like arXiv as a primary career-advancement signal, complaining about closed-access journals is tilting at windmills.

Changing the law to prevent journals from being able to copyright anything could potentially force the research industry to rapidly develop a new solution, but at the cost of short-term chaos and career instability for new academics.

I feel like this is one of those classic local minima where a community starving for resources fights vociferously amongst itself because they have internalized that they can’t win externally. From where I sit outside academia the problem with science seems obvious: there is not nearly enough money going into it.

I doubt bringing the heads of for-profit journals would change that under current national conditions in the U.S.

Given that reviews are not a mechanism to check for truth but soundness, the higher profile the thing I would imagine there would be more misconduct. I mean would one risk prison to steal 10$ or to steal 1 million $?

> lower research quality [3]

To cite exactly from your link "the evidence is mixed about whether they are strongly correlated with indicators of research quality.". I find saying "lower" a bit too strong given the original quote.

> in fact weaker statistical power and reliability [4]

For a specific field "cognitive neuroscience and psychology papers published recently"!

> statistical reliability even in high prestige journals is still extremely poor overall [5]

According to https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti... they kind of targeted bio/medical/psychology field for the analysis. Which seems to me very focused to be able to draw general conclusions.

> 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:

It's a coin toss if paper could get accepted at all, and that's less than ideal but what the system should do (at least) is reject obvious crap, not ensure that something gets clearly accepted. The danger is False Positive (accepted even if it's crap) rather than False Negative (rejected even if it might be something useful).

Overall note: the review system is not ideal and should be improved. But it's a hard, complex and delicate problem.