Science in decline: Is quality sacrificed for quantity and ease of access?

"Scientific advancement is obstructed by excessive Article Processing Charges

The OA publication model has gained traction over the last two decades allowing for free access to scientific publications by end users (Laakso et al. Citation2011, Tennant et al. Citation2016). This approach differs from traditional scientific publishing where online or print-only articles were located behind expensive subscription paywalls and were therefore not freely available. The OA model has become the new norm, with many journals moving to either exclusively OA (termed “OA Gold”) where authors pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) or the ‘hybrid’ model where the authors can choose to either pay for OA or opt out on OA, resulting in the article remaining behind a paywall. Some publishers also have an “OA Green” option where the authors can self-archive a prepublication version of the article, which is not formatted by the publisher and is not available through them. Many institutions encourage or even force their researchers to publish OA Gold. Indeed, the Coalition-S model for European researchers now requires any science generated with public funding to publish OA (e.g., https://www.coalition-s.org/about/). On the surface, publishing OA resonates as an extraordinary model for scientific publishing because research outputs are easily accessible and unaffordable subscription paywalls are removed...."