“Subscription-based publishing business models inhibit open scholarly communication by making consumers of scientific outputs pay to access findings. Open access business models promote open communication, but the popular Article Processing Charge (APC) model is not perfect. APC’s can be a burden for under-resourced authors and, most critically, the model creates incentives for journals to publish as many outputs as possible. This open access business model conflicts with another theme of the broader open science movement—to improve rigor and credibility of research. Preprints solve this dilemma. Preprinting makes almost all papers freely available at very low cost.
Wait a second.
The problem with APCs is that it incentivizes journals to publish as much as possible, whatever the quality; so the solution is to publish everything, whatever the quality?
Yes, exactly.
With preprinting, publishing is a relatively trivial act. Authors need only meet modest moderation criteria for their preferred preprint service. When most anything can be published, publication recedes as the key incentive. What takes its place? Evaluation. Journals have historically confounded publication with evaluation. If the paper meets the evaluation criteria, then it is published. Therefore, publication is the act that signals credibility for authors’ work and evaluation—peer review—is an impediment to achieving that reward. …”