Alright Matt, I do miss out on a lot of things from the science side of this article because this is really about Alexandra but here we go—your rhetorical questions answered.

"What happens without a good peer review system?"

Not that I'm critizing the peer review system anywhere on the article, but now that you mention it—the peer review system isn't good.

It's slow at best, unreliable at worst (check #sixwordpeerreview on twitter, or this article, or this one).

But most importantly, it's done by other scientists on a volunteer basis (as you mention yourself), not by journals. Which means the two are independent from each other.

But worry not, I doubt science will end up anything like Facebook. Average facebook's users would never read an academic paper, let alone review it.

"Why not give the results for free?"

It's not free. We paid for it once through taxes.

We paid for it already Matt.

It should not be free, it should be given.

Because again, we already paid for it.

"How do you propose that this body of knowledge get curated?"

Now here you do have a point, cause I don't have an answer.

I mean we have peer review, but as I've mentioned, it's slow and imperfect. Preprints surged as an attempt to solve the problems with peer review but that came with a whole lot of other problems.

The thing is, no one has an answer for that. The system is biased and imperfect (because we are). My point is that journals' exorbitants fees do nothing to mitigate them.

Journals want to turn a profit, not to safeguard science's integrity. If wanted the latter, The Lancet wouldn't have ran the article linking autism and MMR vaccines that launch a whole bloody anti-vaxx movement—or at least they wouldn't have waited 12 fucking years to retract themselves.

"Most researchers get free access through their research institution"

Because the research institution pays for the subscriptions. That's $500K-$2M a year, way more than a penny.

Which only first world universities and institutions can afford.

I could say something about student debt and tuition fees here.

"With the collapse of curated publications, knoweldge will become ad revenue based, promoted with click bait"

Lol Matt, the mention of ad revenue makes me think you aren't yet informed of how much money if been poured down the drain here.

But also, academic clickbait and scientific misinformation are a thing already. We don't have to wait for anyone's collapse. The ones who prefer these headline-worthy studies are the journals you are trying to defend—scientists only produce them cause they know that's the kind of stuff that gets published.

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If you wanna read about how scammy the business model is:

- Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

- Scientific publishing is a rip-off. We fund the research – it should be free

I've only taken this much bother with this comment cause your heart is in the right place so I can't have you walking around defending these scumbags' business model Matt.

Thanks for reading 🖤