zlacker

Since corporations have captured government, the solution is as you say, to "burn down" the old journals and rebuild them on top of arxiv, dblp, semantic scholar, git, etc. The ACM is slowly starting to open up, but it really needs to go all in and just be free for everyone and get a lower amount of of funding from way more sources.

You can run a better journal for free than what you can get from Elsevier. Throw in forums, video conferencing and shared docs and you can build entire academic structures in the cloud. Run a journal on a subreddit, papers on arxiv, video on meet (recordings posted to youtube), code in github, computation on colab notebooks. WeWork should offer wetlab space. ;)

Ideally we would have a storage commons where data that doesn't fit into the arxiv model of papers. Something like object storage but with some built in structure.

>>sitkac+(OP)
The problem is that this assumes academics want to change and use new methods to distribute their work. The primary goal of all academics is to secure more grants - what happens afterwards is an afterthought.

>>sitkac+(OP)
> You can run a better journal for free than what you can get from Elsevier.

If you staff and pay for it.

You're also forgetting that the entire point of Journals is so that research institutions don't have to think about how to dole out the grant money. In addition to actually creating an entire new journal, you also have to make sure its "reputation" is better than the existing journals, or nobody will use it.