When I was a graduate student, I was desperate for publications so I would take the path of least resistance in the copyright and licensing agreements during manuscript submission. “Take my soul in exchange for manuscript acceptance”; I signed away my rights. I am still thirsty to publish and to get citations but now, I have more reputation and time to right my previous wrongs and proceed the right way forward. I disagree that our work lies behind paywalls because:
My government used taxpayer dollars to fund for my work so the taxpayers (at least Americans) should be able to see my work
The more people who have access to my work, the more people can participate and contribute to science at a faster pace
I would like more people to engage with me about my work to make my work better
Peer-reviewed journals are still good for certain reasons, like quality control, and that justifies some expense BUT unjustified expenses include 1) one-off paper reviewers are not paid, 2) associate editors are paid minimally, and 3) editors usually already have full-time positions outside this responsibility. Could we get quality contributions outside of this monetary system?
We’re already seeing in many different fields, especially the computer science domain, that we can get quality work published for free (shout out to arxiv). Their solution is pre-print archiving. Currently, this solution is not a replacement for peer-reviewed conference or journal papers; archiving is a secondary and parallel path to intellectual distribution. You will still need to a reputable conference (which distributes paper reviews among session organizers) or a reputable journal. There are certainly also growing pains in publishing in the public domain without quality control, such as Yoav’s commentary on preemptive scooping and decrease in publication quality.
How do you check if the journal you’re submitting to has lax pre-print policies so you can make your work accessible? Check SHERPA. “SHERPA RoMEO gives a summary of publishers' open access archiving conditions for individual journals.” You may also send a letter to your journal before publication to modify your copyright and licensing agreement. A cookie-cutter letter and explanation of your rights may be obtained at this website.
There are other ways to get academic information outside of the traditional paper. Scientists have taken to Twitter and will frequently update articles they have recently published or that they’re interested in tracking (I’m not that active on Twitter so I’m unsure of the effectiveness of this method). Distill.pub is a nice example of stuffy journal manuscripts transitioning to a more digestible blog format and I love me some easily digestible information. Still, after reading one of their articles, I found that the intention to explain the information more simply to a broader range of readers sacrificed technical accuracy. There’s an appropriate platform for the information you want to convey and I would urge you to choose the most accessible option.