Springer has had issues for a long time. During my PhD, within the research field of Genetic Programming, there is an author who only published to Springer. This author always had the best results in the field. Reliably, when ever some new results would come out, this person would publish to Springer with better results. Vague methods, no reproducibility. So when I went and built a non-GP algorithm and improve the state-of-art by orders of magnitude, low and behold this person was able to improve upon my results. It seems as though there is no actual editorial activity over there at all<p>When Docker first came out, one of my advisors and I pondered how we might use it to aid in the reproducibility crisis in academic research. I don't think anything ever came of it, certainly the situation seems to have deteriorated since. There are a lot of good researchers out there, but I fear many of them do the same dealing with the dumb system we find in large bureaucracies in the private sector<p>In some ways it is worse. Reviewers are expected to put in free labor for the journals and then we have to either put our own work behind a paywall or "pay for the privilege" to have it be open access.<p>Perhaps we should take a stab at building open-review features, reviewers, journals, reproducibility, and transparency around Arxiv. They have a survey banner on the site right now, lets suggest some ideas! (edit: sadly, the survey is quite limited and irrelevant to improving the practice of research)