I have had so many "why don't you just" conversations with academics about this. I know the "why don't you just" guy is such an annoying person to talk to, but I still don't really understand why they don't just.

This article pointed to a few cases where people tried to do the thing, i.e. the pledge taken by individual researchers, and the requirements placed by certain funding channels, and those sound like a solid attempt to do the thing. This shows that people care and are somewhat willing to organise about it.

But the thing I don't understand is why this can't happen at the department level? If you're an influential figure at a top-5 department in your field, you're friends with your counterparts at the other 4. You see them in person every year. You all hate $journal. Why don't you club together and say "why don't we all have moratorium on publishing in $journal for our departments?"

No temptation for individual research groups to violate the pledge. No dependence on individual funding channels to influence the policy. Just, suddenly, $journal isn't the top publication in that field any more?

I'm sure there are lots of varied reasons why this is difficult but fundamentally it seems like the obvious approach?

> If you're an influential figure at a top-5 department in your field ... you all hate $journal.

That's the problem, they don't hate these journals, they love them. Generally speaking they're old people who became influential by publishing in these journals. Their reputation and influence was built on a pile of Science and Nature papers. Their presentations all include prominent text indicating which figures came from luxury journals. If Science and Nature lose their prestige so do they (or at least that's what they think)

This was very apparent when eLife changed their publishing model. Their was a big outpouring of rage from older scientists who had published in eLife when it was a more standard "high impact" journal. Lots of "you're ruining your reputation and therefore mine".

I think the call for top-down policy makes sense b/c otherwise this is like every other tragedy of the commons situation. Each of those top-level researchers also has to think, "my department has junior faculty trying to build their publications list for tenure, we have post-docs and grad-students trying to get a high-impact publication to help them land a faculty job, we have research program X which is kind of in a race with a program at that other school lower down in the top 20. If we close off opportunities with the top journals, we put all of those at a competitive disadvantage."

For the grad students especially, there’d be a career advancement incentive to still publish in the top journals. The professors might still want to publish in them just out of familiarity (with a little career incentive as well, although less pronounced than the grad students).

I think it’d be a big ask from someone whose role doesn’t typically cover that sort of decision.

There are hundreds of reputable research universities around the world. Top-5 departments can't meaningfully change the culture of a field on their own. Top-100 perhaps could, but the coordination problem is much bigger on that level.

Grant funding reporting requirements. It would be easy to say self publish for free via the institutional library. But the NIH would not like that use of their money.

I like the author's idea:

> So the solution here is straightforward: every government grant should stipulate that the research it supports can’t be published in a for-profit journal. That’s it! If the public paid for it, it shouldn’t be paywalled.

The article then acknowledges this isn't a magic solution to all the problems discussed, but it's so simple and makes so much sense as a first step.

I'm no expert here and there are probably unintended consequences or other ways to game that system for profit, but even if so wouldn't that still be a better starting point?

I explain here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47250811) but tl;dr it's because Universities need this system to get money and to give money. Nobody has yet proposed a solution which solves the money/prestige problem. With no money there's no research.