Academic occupies an unusual economic position that would not survive in most markets.
The content is produced by researchers who are not paid by the publisher.
It is reviewed by other researchers who are also not paid.
It is then sold back to the institutions that employed both, at prices that rose faster than inflation for three decades.
was proposed to break that circle and has partly done so in a way nobody intended.
The dominant model now charges the author rather than the reader.
A of several thousand dollars removes a barrier for readers and installs a larger one for writers.
Researchers with grant funding pay it from the grant; researchers without funding do not publish there.
The barrier has moved from the reader in a poor country to the author in the same country.
exist, are documented and are used less than the need would predict.
Applying for one requires declaring a status that a researcher may prefer not to declare.
offer a different route that costs almost nothing and receives a fraction of the attention.
An author deposits the accepted , and the version of record remains behind a that nobody needs to cross.
Funders that mandated deposit achieved near-universal compliance at no cost to anybody.
Publishers responded by lengthening periods, which regulators have variously permitted and forbidden.
The deeper issue is that prestige is attached to journal titles rather than to articles.
An author choosing where to submit is choosing a hiring committee's impression, not a reader.
Until assessment changes, every reform redistributes a cost rather than removing it.