Dear Julie,
I fully agree with Monbiot's criticism of scientific publishing by
academic publishers and believe it is far from paranoia.
The main scape out are the open journals. For many of us third world
researchers the main difficulty regarding open journals are page
charges. I believe it can be partially staked round by including
publication costs in advance in our projects.
Personally I am beginning to do that. It is not a perfect solution
because projects frequently ends before articles are published or even
submitted.
I am also not a fan of high-impact journals. In a web era like ours,
articles are searched for easily and most people tends to pick them
according to affinity to current interests and not so much by the
"importance" of the vehicle. We should free ourselves from the
largely psychological need to publish in famous journals.
All the best,
Alexandre
