Complaints about the broken academic publishing system have been around for years and are getting louder. A common theme is that with the rise of open access publishing, commercial publishers have grasped the opportunity to grow their profits from article-processing-charges (APCs). Whereas in the past, journals competed to be the most highly respected outlet, now they compete to publish on the grounds of speed and quantity of publications (see e.g. Timmis et al, 2025).
