[andrepd]

What an odd thing to say. You're saying that you don't think having to wait months to read a paper through backchannels has negatively affected the research output of that lab?

> This is not even conjecture. [...] humanity seemed to have collectively gone dumber by a century if anything.

"Kids these days" effect. People have been complaining about generational decline for at least 2500 years. What are you basing your assertion on, gut feeling? Social media? Clickbaity news? You probably also overestimate the educational level of humanity 100 years ago.

[ramraj07]

I did train through times when access to articles wasn’t easy (because there was no scihub and I worked in india) and honestly getting the articles was not even my 10th biggest concern. I always had 50-100 pdfs ready to read, adding more to that queue was not an issue. Only times when access to literature was a problem was when you had a particular article you needed details from (which weren’t in the abstract). This was rarely a blocker and if it was there were options.

Again, I’m not saying I wouldn’t prefer to have free unfettered access to all research ever performed, or that we should give these publishers a pass, but I want to emphasize that this is not a big issue for academics. Funding, focus, politics, the culture of publish or perish, the Ponzi scheme like training funnel, these are the bigger issues.

[pksebben]

bigger issues, perhaps, but it's not either-or, and the issues are connected.

the monopoly on publishing centralizes control over information, which allows publishers to set the terms (publish or perish, publishing focus)

the political and funding landscape are then shaped by an entity that now has a structurally adversarial relationship to the academics that form it's value base, as it's interests are only served by keeping that community subordinate.