[matthewdgreen]

With due respect, if Elsevier and Springer (and IEEE etc.) went away tomorrow Science would not “be fucked”. We would be forced to sit down and work through a set of new open access journals and conferences. It would be an annoying few months and some publishing activities would be modestly disrupted. But all of the reviewing and editing and conference chairing is already run by volunteers. The only reason we don’t replace the journals now is because of (huge amounts of) path dependence and because nobody can solve the coordination problem of getting everyone to drop everything and do it. But if those publishers went away tomorrow, you’d solve both those problems in an instant.

[robwwilliams]

Absolutely agree. The loss of prestige journals would be salutary and force researchers to focus on content, not cover.

GK Marinov, BJ Wold, and colleagues analyzed the quality of nearly 800 ChIP-seq datasets in the NIH GEO database (see figure S8 in their 2014 G3 paper: https://doi.org/10.1534/g3.113.008680 ). They independently scored the quality of data generation and analysis and then compare their summary quality scores to the journal impact factor in which each dataset was published.

Can you guess the polarity of the correlation? Yes, it was negative, and consistently so over a five year span.

[AlbertCory]

Thanks, the question isn't "do they still provide a service?" but "what would happen if they disappeared?"

As you showed, research might be unsettled for a while, but pretty soon they'd just be a bad memory.