[indubitable]

Without defending the current system of publication, many things that are government funded are not free. For instance, our ironically named freeways. And nearly all government offered services from postal to patents come with costs and fees, which can become quite obscene.

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@pwinnski - This is likely either a dialect or national language issue. In the US, at least the section where I am from, freeways are what you might call highways. They have no traffic lights, are high speed, and have toll booths for entry and spread along them at intervals. Hence the reason I stated their naming quite ironic! They are built by government, but are not freely available. Responding here since hacker news seems to stop you from replying in a thread once something you post has been mass downvoted.

[pwinnski]

I'm confused. Freeways are, in fact, free. Both in movement and in cost to use. If a highway charges tolls, it is not a freeway. If a highway has traffic lights, it is not a freeway.

You may be conflating price with cost, but the two are not the same. The government funding of the cost of freeways means that the price is free to all users.

[bjelkeman-again]

In many countries there are taxes you have to pay to be allowed to use the roads.

[fao_]

Yes, but that's because use of a road causes wear. Homeowners didn't want to foot the bill for the road outside their house, and potholes are a real problem to safety. People who use the roads are the ones creating potholes, so why not charge them for that? It's a public service, like the fire service or the national health service.

[simonh]

The fact there’s a reason for it doesn’t change the fact.

However yes, public highways cost money to maintain. They can’t be truly free unless the construction and maintenance were free - donated land and volunteer labour? Right. Otherwise somebody has to pay for it.

Frankly it’s potentially the same way with published scientific papers, we do need a system of professional peer review. That could be voluntary, but would probably be better if it were independently funded in some way. ArXiv is one approach but I’m not sure it’s a complete solution.

[taneq]

Now imagine your state funded public highways were vetted by some private company, let's call them "Elsewhere, Inc", who wrote a 3-line review of each highway and then charged taxpaying members of the public $30-$50 per journey to use those highways. And then Elsewhere, Inc managed to convince most civil engineering companies to gauge employees' performance solely by whether or not Elsewhere, Inc has reviewed the roads they built.

[jhbadger]

Actually, imagine that rather than writing the reviews themselves, Elsewhere simply asked other road builders to evaluate the roads of their peers for free. That's the situation in publishing -- the publishers don't even do the peer review -- they get content for free from authors, get peer review for free from reviewers, and then charge readers to access the final papers!

[TeMPOraL]

Peer review is already being done and it's free. Distribution is "too cheap to meter". Editing is pretty much not done at all at the publisher level.

So to fit the road tax model - we already pay for research. So let's add 0.0001$ extra tax for publishing, and kill off the current publishers.

[Gravityloss]

Peer reviewers are not usually compensated.

[Maken]

Peer review is voluntary and done by other researchers in the field. Publishers mostly take care of editing the final text (basically typos and formatting) and uploading them to their servers.

[pwinnski]

We pay taxes whether we use the roads or not. Those taxes are decoupled from any given road. Further, when I visit a state in which I do not live, I use those freeways without paying a cent, directly or indirectly.

If the complaint is that roads require maintenance and are therefore not free, that's a torture of the word.

[cc81]

You are paying taxes that fund research as well.