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by diqu 3880 days ago
> University computing centers can donate storage space to the project

If we leave the publishing-as-a-business area, I wonder how much university libraries currently pay annually for their subscriptions. And I do wonder, if it would make sense for universities to let their libraries take care of archiving and publishing the respective uni's publications. Open-access everything, host it at home.
1 comments
omginternets 3879 days ago
This is a good point. An implicit assumption of mine is that it's cheaper to donate computing resources than to pay the journal subscription fees.

To reiterate, however, I think it'll still be necessary to have some sort of submission fee to cover the costs of peer-review.

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mandor 3879 days ago
... and we still need to understand what these "costs of peer review" are! We are never paid for reviewing papers and most editors work for free. There is free software to handle the peer review process (e.g. http://myreview.sourceforge.net) which are used by some serious journals for years (e.g. http://ecj.fhv.at / http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/evco).

A few more points: - people outside of computer sciences (and maybe physics) do not want to deal with LaTeX. As a result, they want to submit ugly word files and get a nicely formatted paper out of it (this has a cost, but not in CS where we submit nicely formatted LaTeX papers)

- most journals do not do copy-editing, but the big ones actually work on the figures, the text, fix the references, etc. Again, this is not common in CS.

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