Author-paid publication fees corrupt science and should be abandoned

Author-Paid Open Access and Incentives

• Many agree high APCs (author publication charges) are exploitative given publishers’ high margins and minimal added services.
• Pay-to-publish models are seen as fueling low‑quality and spammy journals; MDPI is mentioned as an easy-to-ignore “spam” brand.
• Some argue author-paid OA is not the core problem; it’s the incentive structure that rewards sheer publication and citation counts.

Prestige, Journals, and Prisoner’s Dilemma

• Career advancement, grants, and PhD completion heavily depend on publishing in high‑impact, selective journals.
• This creates a prisoner’s dilemma: everyone knows arXiv/WWW-style publishing could be better, but no one can risk abandoning prestige venues alone.
• In some fields (e.g., biomed), journal brand and editor gatekeeping matter more than reviewers per se.

Peer Review: Problems and Proposals

• Complaints about superficial or misguided reviews, reviewer anonymity, and political/editorial interference.
• Suggestions include:
  • Rewarding peer review more than raw publication counts.
  • Making reviews public and subject to “peer review of peer review.”
  • Double-blind review to hide author identity; disagreement on whether reviewers should remain anonymous.
• Concerns that open, non-anonymous review could lead to favoritism and retaliation.

Metrics, Gaming, and Goodhart’s Law

• Heavy criticism of reliance on paper counts, h-index, and citations as proxies for quality.
• Examples of citation rings, mega-collaborations with thousands of coauthors, and ML/CS papers that are hard or impossible to reproduce.
• Observations that metrics invite gaming, shifting effort from doing good science to optimizing numbers.

Field Differences and Quality Crisis

• Perceived severity varies by field:
  • Medicine/clinical research and epidemiology described as especially plagued by poor design, data dredging, and careerist projects.
  • CS/ML has its own replication issues and selective reporting, despite strong preprint culture.
• Some link systemic flaws to declining public trust in science; others argue denialism would exist regardless.

Proposed Structural Reforms

• Shift evaluation toward importance of questions, rigor, and quality of review rather than volume of output.
• Strengthen society/overlay journals and institutional curation of arXiv.
• Tighten grant and hiring standards to penalize use of dubious venues and metrics gaming.
• A few argue the root problem is broader political/economic pressures (competition for scarce funding, student loan system).