[JuettnerDistrib]

I applaud this change!

In practice, however, I don't think much will change. In astronomy, and my subfield in particular, all papers are free on arXiv, and the publishing and referee process are almost more of an afterthought: the threat that you better produce a high-quality paper to get it officially published and usable in a job application.

But for research, arXiv is king. (There are even reports of some people no longer bothering submitting to a journal once they got tenure...)

If you can't pay the publication charges (usually paid by your grant), then there are other reputable journals in astronomy like MNRAS and Physical Review D. Physical review even let's you submit by importing from arXiv.

[yawnxyz]

in biology we have bioRxiv, but there's still a lot of hesitancy to submit to it, especially by PIs.

Covid certainly helped push the field in that direction, and eLife is going to only publish articles from preprints going forward: https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/e5f8f1f7/what-we-have...