This results in the present situation where publicly-funded researchers and other taxpayers must pay to access research which was originally publically funded, and which was peer reviewed for free by those same publicly funded researchers. The vast majority of research still remains inaccessible to most people on this planet (Piwowar et al., 2018). This has deep and negative consequences for the progress of research, and its wider use in society to help resolve major issues which affect economies, the environment, and health on a global scale.
The current academic research evaluation system also needs a much needed overhaul (e.g., DORA, the Leiden Manifesto). At the moment it is a profoundly unscientific practice, with far-reaching negative consequences (e.g., Brembs et al., 2013). At the moment it is geared towards rewarding explicitly for the publication of ‘high impact’ research articles, with these venues often owned by commercial publishers. This creates a perverse system of incentives, which leads to a ‘publish or perish’ culture, and the current ‘reproducibility crisis’. This also means that the production of other outputs (e.g., code, data, hardware) is seen as secondary or lesser value, which creates an output-driven bias in research.