Academia is facing serious well-documented challenges from current models for scholarly publishing: problems in peer-review, poor evaluation criteria for research and researchers, absence of fair credit for contribution, non-communication and redundancy, long delays in publication, and irreproducibility of research data and results. There are several reasons why these challenges exist. One of which is the exaggerated commercial interest of publishers,  who act as middlemen in what should actually be a peer-to-peer evaluation process.  This is then compounded by having a “publish or perish” culture. These problem are systemic and deeply-ingrained, so much so that both science and wider society suffers.
 
At present, scientific and medical research is typically submitted to be peer reviewed and then published in academic journals or at conferences. According to the International Association of Scholarly Publishing’s market report from 2015, the total market is estimated to be worth over $25 billion USD a year, and of that over $10 billion USD is in the English language. Adjusted profit margins for some of the largest publishers are in the region of 37-40% after tax, exposing the industry for the highly exploitative practices that it employs.The research publishing industry is dominated by a small number of publishers that charge high fees to authors to publish. It has been described as ‘oligarchic’ (Lariviere et al., 2015), and the largest publisher Elsevier has been reported for abuse of a dominant position within a dysfunctional scholarly publishing market (Eve et al., 2016). The cost to publish is on average around $5000, based on the total annual revenue for scholarly publishers divided by the total number of articles published each year (Schimmer et al., 2015). Estimates are that only less than 10% of submitted articles are eventually published, and the peer review system is often very slow. As well as this, journals charge individual subscription fees of between $200 to $300 a year to access the published research, with institutional fees often being around $10-15,000 per journal.
 
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.