Just to clarify: Is your position that research written by academic scientists, funded by government grants and university budgets, reviewed by volunteers, and proofread and typeset by the researchers themselves, handed off to a journal to put in a print edition or stick a pdf on their website, should belong exclusively to the corporate owners of the journal for a period of ~100 years after publication, with no profit flowing back to the university, the researcher, or the reviewers?
If this is not your position, can you clarify what you think scientific publishing should look like?
> because it distracts from the job that they are there for.
What is the “job scientific papers are there for”, if not sharing knowledge with other scientists and the people of the world?
As for your silly garbage truck / tank analogy: instead of these, we have buses, which work much better for the task.
Journals made a lot of sense before the age of the internet, when they actually did have to do a lot of work to coordinate the activity of physically collecting research papers, mailing them for reviews, paying dedicated people for typesetting and so on. Although the cost of all of this has almost vanished now that tools for editing are so accessible and delivery costs are inexistent, publishers still charge ridiculous sums for papers produced mostly from public money simply because of their prestige.
If this is not your position, can you clarify what you think scientific publishing should look like?
> because it distracts from the job that they are there for.
What is the “job scientific papers are there for”, if not sharing knowledge with other scientists and the people of the world?
As for your silly garbage truck / tank analogy: instead of these, we have buses, which work much better for the task.