Buried in the middle of this (wonderful) article is the heart of the problem -- academia has foolishly placed its metrics into the hands of editors and publishe

Buried in the middle of this (wonderful) article is the heart of the problem -- academia has foolishly placed its metrics into the hands of editors and publishers, who have corrupted the living hell out of it. Ctrl-F "Cochrane" and witness the exchange between an editor, who benefited from the status quo, and a scholar, who did not and does not. Academia != scholarship and has not for some time. There is no longer a good reason for traditional for-profit journals to exist. (Before someone says it: SpringerNature likes to pretend that editorial independence is possible, but they'll have no choice save to fire their "news" guys if their board asks for this). Please recall that the entire point of the World Wide Web was to share physics papers. The arXiv exists because of physicists (who quickly noticed that HTML wasn't a good substitute for LaTeX when writing math-heavy papers). The problem is not technological. It's social. And until the incentives are fixed (the Cochrane Collaboration in Britain has gone a long, long way to address this, and now the Wellcome Trust is going even further), nothing of any real import will change. In the USA, NIH could make a lot of positive changes (and in exchanges with mid- to senior executive level directors, I honestly believe they're trying to do so). But it will take time. Academia moves with glacial speed, when it moves at all.