Fully agree but I can tell you about point 1 that there enough gullible scientists in the world that see nothing wrong with the current system.

They will gadly pick up free review when Nature comes knocking, since its "such an honour" for such a reputable paper.

Something else we can do: regulate. Like every other corrupt industry in the history of the world, we need the force of law to fix it--and for pretty much all the same reasons. People worked at Triangle Shirtwaist because they had to, not because they thought it was a great place to work.

Exactly. Asking some grad student to take on these ancient, corrupt publishing systems at the expense of their career and livelihood is ridiculous

applied for a grant last month, now to finalize grant you need to publish things in open access format. (EU country; there's a push for all publicly funded research to be open access, with it being a requirement from year ??? on, not sure when, but soon) there's some special funding set aside just for open access fees, which is still rotten because these leeches still stand to profit. then, if you miss that, then there's an agreement where my uni pays a selection of publishers to let in certain number of articles per year open access, which is basically the same thing but with different source of funding (not from grant, but straight from ministry)

This is probably the avenue to shut this down. If funding is contingent on making the publication freely available to download, and that comes from a major government funding source, then this whole scam could die essentially overnight.

That would need to somehow get enough political support to pass muster in the first place and pass the inevitable legal challenge that follows, too. So, really, this is just another example of regulatory capture ruining everything.

i hear you, but this leaves this massive gaping hole very quickly filled by predatory journals

the better solution would be journals created and maintained by universities or other institutions with national (or international, like from EU) funding

I’m sympathetic but to a limit

That’s all I’m saying 🤷‍♂️

Too true