As much as I hate the copyright model used by the scientific journals, they do have a valid raison-d-etre. It's about prioritization due to limited capacity. If you artificially limit the number of published articles to X per month, you are forced to pick X best ones (according to whichever metric you choose). If you just publish anything that gets a decent peer review score, you'll get voting rings, generated articles, and all sorts of junk.
Has anybody noticed how the quality of journalism plummeted with the transition from physical copies (that had an implied limit on the number of articles) to the online "portals" (that are incentivized to churn out as much clickbait as possible)?
That said, the financial streams should go the other way. Pay a non-refundable fee to get considered for publishing, but otherwise if it's a tax-funded research, it must be public domain.
That’s not how it really works in many fields. Most of CS doesn’t care about journals, just conferences, and physics and other hard sciences rely primarily on the arXiv. Meritocracy survives just fine without journals.
I would love to see journal editors transition into more of a "curatorial" role. Journals as publishing outlets don't need to exist anymore. The arXiv and other preprint services (e.g., Open Science Framework) have solved the online publishing part of the equation. But you're right -- when anyone can publish anything, the bar gets really low, really fast. Journals could still play a valuable role as curators, by (a) providing peer review, and (b) creating curated lists of arXiv/OSF papers that meet their standards and interests. I really feel like what's missing are the second-layer solutions on top of arXiv that help to sift through the massive amounts of information -- that can include recommendation algorithms, but it could also include the experts that currently serve as editors for major journals. We don't need to cut out journals, we need to cut out the for-profit publishers.
Has anybody noticed how the quality of journalism plummeted with the transition from physical copies (that had an implied limit on the number of articles) to the online "portals" (that are incentivized to churn out as much clickbait as possible)?
That said, the financial streams should go the other way. Pay a non-refundable fee to get considered for publishing, but otherwise if it's a tax-funded research, it must be public domain.