"Publish or perish" is not about publishing papers. It's about winning the competition for opportunities to do science. It's about collecting more merits than your peers, in order to land on the right side of the funding line. If publishing becomes easier, you need to publish more in order to win. Or publishing becomes less relevant, and you have to focus on other merits.
If there are more qualified and interested scientists than funding opportunities, there is competition. If you want less competition, you need fewer potential scientists and/or more funding.
The main flaw in the article from my point of view is the administrator attitude. You identify a problem, and then you propose solving it by playing politics and making major changes to the system, with unpredictable consequences across the fields. A more constructive approach would be focusing on solving the problem in your own niche, and letting others figure out the solutions in theirs.
For example, instead of complaining about for-profit publishers and other abstract things, people can just act. There are examples of editorial boards resigning collectively and starting independent journals, which then replace the old for-profit journals or at least become competitive with them. And in some subfields of computer science, many conferences have moved their proceedings from Springer to the LIPIcs series published by a German non-profit.
If there are more qualified and interested scientists than funding opportunities, there is competition. If you want less competition, you need fewer potential scientists and/or more funding.
The main flaw in the article from my point of view is the administrator attitude. You identify a problem, and then you propose solving it by playing politics and making major changes to the system, with unpredictable consequences across the fields. A more constructive approach would be focusing on solving the problem in your own niche, and letting others figure out the solutions in theirs.
For example, instead of complaining about for-profit publishers and other abstract things, people can just act. There are examples of editorial boards resigning collectively and starting independent journals, which then replace the old for-profit journals or at least become competitive with them. And in some subfields of computer science, many conferences have moved their proceedings from Springer to the LIPIcs series published by a German non-profit.