Nice, I am really curious what becomes of this.
America’s a plutocracy, so there’s like a 90% chance nothing will come of it.
What the scientific community needs to do is make publishers irrelevant by creating a series of FOSS projects similar to the fediverse — architected, coded, owned, and operated by the scientific community — with the explicit goal of making a universal scientific journal where peer review is open, transparent, and at cost.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for a handful of publishers to gate-keep peer-review in 2024. All of the problems are technically solved, and inexpensive. The only thing that’s necessary is the will.
That already exists. It’s called arXiv, and is used by mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists. Everyone else has to pay up.
The reality is that this idea wouldn’t really fix any of the actual issues in academia. The only thing that would fix the problems with science is the end of capitalism.
about time