Actually, not so much in this case. Open-access publishing is cheaper for researchers as well as readers -- much, much cheaper. The problem is only getting from here to there. There is no question than the grass really is greener on the other side, for everyone except the middle-men currently growing fat on the Proprietary Academic Publishing Tax.
I'm not convinced they perform no useful function. At the least, they curate the collection. Who will do that? For free? Reliably?
Its disingenuous to say "Lets have X for free" without examining the economics. Why not cars for free? Free movies! I'd like that, Netflix is expensive.
The editors are academics, and paid very, very little.
Essentially, all the journals do is print them (which is pointless these days) and maintain the website (which is something that could easily be done by libraries).
In fact, most universities provide open access repositories for all of the papers of their academics, so the journal websites could be reduced to a submission site, and links to the finalised papers with very little injection of money.
Joe, no-one is suggesting curation, hosting, indexing and the like should be done for free. (At least, I a not!) We are suggesting that the result of this work should be available to all -- including, crucially, the researchers who did the work and the citizens whose taxes funded it. Increasingly, we are seeing the author-pays model work well, with publication fees coming out of project grants.
That seems like a conflict of interest for the publisher. For every article filtered out, they lose money?
Or pay to submit and risk not being accepted anyway? Kind of a 'poll tax', where you have to have money to be heard. In principle its shakey either way, though if the fees were low enough...
