How to fix academic publishing again already

Last week I was ranting about academic publishing.

A paper I submitted to a journal in June was finally reviewed. Two referees liked it and suggested some helpful modifications, the third referee wrote incomprehensible nonsense, quoting lots of sentences which were not in the manuscript (go figure). On 23rd October I was asked to submit a revised manuscript, but because the journal is moving from one publisher to another (you can probably figure out who it is), I was told:

"We are in the process of moving to our new Open Access publisher so watch out for new information on how to submit your revised manuscript."

So I waited.
On Friday 11th November I received two emails. One was from the journal, saying:

"This e-mail is simply a reminder that your revision is due in one week. If it is not possible for you to submit your revision within one week, we will consider your paper as a new submission."

Sigh. I have resubmitted the revised version I have been waiting to send for the last month. The other email was from the manager of our institutional repository, saying:

"...for the month of October one of your publications archived on the Leicester Research Archive was accessed 373 times:
Reflective Social Portfolios for Feedback and Peer Mentoring (Cann, Alan James et al)
This made it the 2nd most accessed Leicester research publication on the Leicester Research Archive (LRA) last month."

I really have just about had it with academic publishers. Unless someone gets an arXiv-style post-publication peer review education journal going soon, (I'm looking at you Weller ;-) with these numbers, I can't see any alternative but to simply submit my future papers to the repository, and the publishers can go and (rest deleted of sentence deleted).

So here's a message to all repository managers:

Give me my personal impact data. I need to know how many people are reading what I write and who (i.e. where) they are. That data trumps journal citation factors. Give me that and the repository becomes my first choice publishing destination.

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