These are the dying throes of a industry that knows its days are numbered. In biology, we now have biorxiv - arxiv but for biology papers - and the growth of p

These are the dying throes of a industry that knows its days are numbered. In biology, we now have biorxiv - arxiv but for biology papers - and the growth of papers there has been exponential (source: https://twitter.com/cshperspectives/status/1192208484013674496/photo/1 https://twitter.com/cshperspectives/status/11922084840136744... ) Biorxiv is free, not peer reviewed, and accepts any format the paper is in (except reviews and rebuttals IIRC). IMHO: Papers posted to biorxiv are, currently, of higher quality than what you get as a peer reviewer from journals, because authors rely a little bit on the peer review process to clear up any remaining problems. Sometimes this actually happens. Once people are getting used to biorxiv, we'll see more low quality stuff getting submitted there, but still - biorxiv has shown us that in the Internet age, biology doesn't really need journals. HOWEVER funding bodies, universities, people who have to judge your scientific work still rely on the stamp of journals 100%. My current employer wants us to submit at least 5 papers per year in the top 10% impact factor (IF) journals of our field. If we get into a really large IF journal (Nature, Science), we get a small financial bonus. Universities are, in turn, judged based on in how many high-IF journals they publish (think uni rankings). The higher the ranking, the easier it is to advertise to students, the more money you get in fees. As long as these people can't find a different measurement for quality of scientific work we're stuck with journals - but once we have a different measurement, we can toss journals out the window immediately.