Ad Astra Simul

From https://astera.org/unblocking-scientific-publishing/:

Please note that Astera is currently focused on addressing technological bottlenecks. At the moment, restructuring incentives is out of scope.

While I’m glad to see efforts to modernize and open up scientific publishing, I’d be even gladder if we could outgrow the notion that technology will solve social or structural problems. We’ve had technical solutions to scientific publishing challenges for three decades, but publishers and research institutions haven’t had sufficient incentives to adopt them, so their creators haven’t had sufficient incentives to make them usable in the hands of people who aren’t comfortable resolving merge conflicts in Git, editing YAML configuration files, or formatting tables in LaTeX. I believe that unless and until we start teaching people how to do what the creators of PLOS and the RSE movement did—i.e., how to change the rules of the game—new technology will once again only help the computational one percent.

Further reading: Twenty-Five Years and Counting