[cowsandmilk]

> every scientist to effect change: just publish your results in open journals.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem being discussed.

The problem is the pressure to publish frequently, which leads to low quality science. Many of the nobel laureates had at most two, often zero, papers in graduate school. Now, they might require a graduate student to have seven or eight papers to get out. Some of this is a shift to sharing more data, but a lot of it is just science of minimal value being packaged up and pushed out.

And the drive for this does come from generic metrics, that rely not on scientific understanding, but on the ability to count. The government sometimes prioritizes funding by papers/$ funded for grant, papers/year, etc.

[return0]

You are correct , and i indeed did not complete my thinking. If we can't avoid over-publishing, then at least publishing should be open and fast as long as it's technically correct. Personally i find high-IF journals to be a very bad 'filter' for science. Just publish the damn paper, as long as its methodologically correct, and let the entire community assess its significance, not just 3 overworked reviewers and an editor.

I think government officials don't have a direct interest in supporting the current inefficient publishing model, but it's a model that scientists themselves have accepted and reinforced since the 60s. If scientists put forward an alternative model that works better, i dont think governments or the wider public would object.