Author-Paid Publication Fees Corrupt Science and Should Be Abandoned

A little over ten years ago, researchers in the social, behavioral and medical sciences faced a crisis: the replication crisis, provoked by the discovery that many published results could not be replicated and were, in many cases, wrong. The scientific community would respond to this crisis with policy reforms. Among them, Open Access (henceforth “OA”) reforms aimed to benefit the public and underfunded researchers by making publications free to read. OA policies have been extremely popular, and more than 20,000 OA journals now exist whose content is freely available to all (see https://doaj.org/). Collectively, these reforms were intended to put an end to the era of impact-chasing, false-positives, and unpublished truths. In its place would arise a new culture centered on the routine publication and open dissemination of unembellished, robust results. Or so it was hoped. In practice, things didn’t work out as intended. Rather than solving existing problems, some of these scientific reforms have created new and perhaps worse ones as researchers and publishers converged on unanticipated strategies inadvertently incentivized by these new policies. Central to this corruption of science has been pay-as-you-publish “gold” OA publishing. The remedy is to abandon author-paid OA publishing and seek less harmful alternatives.