[mandor]

> I also don't like it but the paper needs be printed and reviewed.

- Reviews are always free (nobody gets paid for reviewing academic paper, in contrast to grant proposal for which we are sometimes paid)

- I have not seen a printed version of a journal for a while (except the very big ones like Nature or Science, but we buy them mostly for the news/view section, not that much for the academic papers at the end)

- Copy editors never did anything useful to my papers. In CS, we usually submit a nice latex file and they do not really do any work on the layout (it might be different in other fields, where people submit crappy MS Word files).

... so, let's say that the added value of the publisher (even for PLOS) is marginal...

[dumbmatter]

So why do open access online-only publishers like PLoS charge $3k/article? Is that just pure profit?

[Fomite]

- Biomedicine primarily uses word, and it's a major area of publishing. I'd also contest that many latex files end up "nice" - I've read more than my share of incoherently organized and formatted latex.

- Some of us like printed journals. I subscribe to at least three.