Yeah increasingly scientists have to pay. It has become the 'principled' thing to make the publishers richer in the name of open access. Sometimes there are waivers for researchers from developing countries. Unfortunately funding bodies haven't universally caught up to the expanded $ needs. Nor have institutions.

There is a model with journals like PeerJ with relatively cheap APCs and a deal where you could sign up for a life membership and publish there indefinitely (but I think coauthors would need to as well). They also only publish based on scientific merit and aren't selective on 'impact', which is good. However, that means they aren't seen as prestigious, so you can't exactly build a career and get promotions going that route.

RE: peer review, in part bc of disruptions due to COVID journal editors have been having a harder time getting people to volunteer to peer review. There has been a lot of talk about moving to a model where reviewers get paid, but again that seems like it would set up some perverse incentives.

RE: Nobel, I don't think it is about citations, pretty sure the judge the impact of a particular body of work/discovery/contribution, qualitatively.

> RE: Nobel, I don't think it is about citations, pretty sure the judge the impact of a particular body of work/discovery/contribution, qualitatively.

Yeah, I pretty much knew (or at least assumed) that. My question was more a half-facetious way of saying academia in general should also do it that way in stead of continuing the current stupidly simplistic quest for journal citation counts.

Sure, I know nobody can afford to invest the same kind of work for every one of the millions of papers produced each year as the Nobel committee does for a few potential laureates. So it would have to be some kind of distributed system, based on the whole international scientific collective... An adaptation of the Slashdot rating system, or something? :-)