Elsevier in its core is a bunch of managers/investors trying to get rich from exploiting scientific achievements for profit. They do not have in mind what's best for science, they've made that perfectly clear.
That's because absolutely no one cares about it except for whining about Elsevier.
We have a perfect way of distributing papers - it is called "Publish it on your blog". If your blog is the most awesome blog or even just more awesome than the lousy blogs, the concerned scientists would go there.
Why isn't it happening? Because the content of the papers published on the blogs suck and no one cares.
> We have a perfect way of distributing papers - it is called "Publish it on your blog". If your blog is the most awesome blog or even just more awesome than the lousy blogs, the concerned scientists would go there.
That would be an extremely worrying way of publishing, as there's no permanence. I regularly hit academic homepages for software or extra data that has now gone. There's also no DOI.
So it's not that perfect after all?
I've read some history about this publishing dependency problem with Elsevier. The scientists are part of the problem too. They are not completely innocent nerds who got bullied into this system. Most of them embraced it for convenience and fame, because, see, they haven't got time and money to do that on their own, because they are so busy 'sciencing' (honestly, most of it isn't 'research' anymore).
I admire the German scientists who finally realized that mistake and now are trying to reverse it, if it is even possible.
Because the issue is not hosting/prodiding publishing venue.
The issue is that submitted original papers that are produced are garbage and neither EICs nor their reviewers give two cents about quality. Had not been the case this would not have happened:
Most of these companies have XML First type programs. What those who are so passionate about this topic should do is do is pay XML First fees for a sample of random 100 papers in 10 random publications and write a scraper to pull the papers in different production stages - from manuscripts to the end result. The beginning state would horrify you.
