Suggested by Ronald Drabkin over 3 years ago

Academic Peer Review is slow, inaccurate, and biased, and behind a paywall. This hurts scientific research, medicine, young academics and those that depend on the research. Slow research - with health impacts to public health - and the cost is born by universities that already have cost too high.

But today, we are stuck with the current system because thats how professors get promoted...publish or perish.

Further

Professors are given tenure based on their success in publishing peer reviewed articles.

The cost to publish a single article in one of these journals is several thousand dollars; universities pay. I don't have market size exactly but there are a lot of journals and a lot of articles, its part of the academic publishing world.

The margins must be very large. The only costs are printing and peer review, the peer review is done on a volunteer basis.

Many problems are evident in this process - most famously the slow volunteer peer review got a lot of criticism, for how long it took to publish articles on corona.

Other problems include

-large cost to universities

-bias in peer review towards those with prestigious titles https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2205779119 and

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02787-5

-very slow, hurting scientific research

-no revisions to articles found to be incorrect, even if there was cheating involved (in most cases - see this one, it only was retracted due to scandal https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831678/

-professors spend too much time that they could use to spend with students. or do more research.

-science research and humanities research are treated the same, even though they should not be. science is time critical.

my creds here: have been working with a couple profs and got peer reviewed articles published, and became a volunteer peer reviewer as well.

its been in the press

universities are starting to refuse to pay the fees

in terms of slow speed of publishing, we have the internet now, info needs to be shared, but this in theory highest quality research isn't readily available to all.