Science journals have a poor reputation among academics. The publishers have a cartel which controls the distribution of scientific papers. It’s not so much the content or the refereeing process that people complain about, although both of these are far from perfect.
The main criticism is the high price and limited access. Sharp practices such as bundling journals to constantly introduce new journals that people are forced to accept if they want the high-impact publications. With universities as the major customer, there is a guaranteed source of income that the publishers exploit.
Until now.
The US government has cancelled the subscriptions for thousands of journals. They are apparently “exorbitantly expensive” and “not a good use of taxpayer funds”.
This is being rolled out across agencies. The NIH claimed they were still subscribing, saying that the journals “promote transparency and replicability in research”. Indeed they do. However, they changed their minds a couple of hours later, saying that they don’t want to pay for “unused subscriptions to junk science”.
This is not a move to get the publishers to behave and sort out their pricing policies. It is a straight attack on science. It is impossible for scientists to work without these references.
They don’t want science. If science doesn’t say what they believe, they must silence it. AI produces something that looks and sounds like science and that is enough for them. They can always make AI agree with them. This is the future.