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I think the issue is more than that though, because if the physical aspect were only the barrier, they should have disappeared by the time the Internet came along. I think (and this is only my honest, outsider perspective) that the issue is, and always was, about trust. As in: who is this dude publishing this paper about high-energy particle physics? I don't know him, so I don't trust him. But I do know about Science, and Nature, and other Journals, so I'm gonna use them. That's why Elsevier and Springer and other publishers continued to exist. Problem is, science isn't about trust. It's about knowledge, and more importantly, truth. But how do get the truth? Well, there's witnesses, and evidence, and Reproducibility™ of statements to produce facts. Y'know, science itself. If we could somehow resolve the reproducibility crisis of science, I think we would be one step closer to ending the parasitic mono-duo-oligo-whateverpoly of these publishers. Because then it would not be about who I trust to move forward the science enterprise. Instead it would be about facts themselves, and about confirming, via evidence and reproducibility of these facts, that would promote a piece of statement into knowledge. And that is how science should always have been, since the very beginning. But the reproduction of experiments is a problem in itself, that might be the cause of the 'relying-on-trust' issue. Since not all experiments are a simple ./build-and-run.sh script, and some involve a lot of money (think anything in medicine, physics, geology, oceanography, and the list goes on to ∞), it ends up being about someone that is reputable and reliable that had money and did the experiment and published in some journal that I know. |