The Crisis of Academic Publishing

These days we are hearing quite a bit about the turmoil within academic publishing--the explosion of dubious journals, the article processing fees (running into the thousands of dollars) scholars and scientists are now expected to pay for the privilege of presenting their work through journals old and new, the inundation of even the most reputable journals with "paper mill" and now artificial intelligence-generated content, much of it of risible quality, some of which makes it into print, on top of the abundance of problems the scholarly and scientific world already faces (like the ongoing crises of particular fields, such as medicine's "crisis of reproducibility" of research results).

To be frank, it leaves me that much more deeply disinclined to go back to submitting to academic journals, and that much more inclined to simply publish my working papers through the Social Science Research Network and leave them at that (especially given how having the official stamp of passage through a peer-reviewed publication now means less than it used to for those counting on being "led by Authority" to make up for their inability to judge a piece of scholarship on its own merits for themselves). Still, if it is enough for my purposes--indeed, very handy for my purposes (I no longer have to worry about items being too long or learn they were "not quite right" for a particular journal's range of concerns after many months of waiting, etc.)--I know that this does not answer all needs by a long way, and I can only wonder how, or even if, the system will come to cope with the new reality.