[indubitable]

Can somebody explain the exact process for free access that people would propose? Most options seem to come with significant and foreseeable 'unforeseen consequences.'

For instance if the idea is that research is submitted to a private journal, as typical, but then the journal is not allowed to charge a fee then that is going to rather lower their prioritization of submissions from public research.

A far worse idea would be government covering the journal fees which would do the exact opposite and overly incentivize public research as companies could send their publication fees through the roof and still have them paid due to government price insensitivity.

Maybe another idea would to have a public government research journal where all research that received public funding is freely available. But this also runs into many problems. One would be that the fundamental point of a journal is to work as a filtering mechanism. We might argue that a lot of mediocre science gets published today, even in more reputable journals. And that's after some odd 80%+ of papers, for those more reputable journals, is rejected. A government clearing house would lose its purpose as a quality filter. And it would also run into the same problems as #1 if we then have the authors submit it in the private industry, where publishing rights/exclusivity are typically part of the model.

So what's the idea?

[gowld]

The problem is solved, save for entrenched incumbents.

Open Access: PLoS https://www.plos.org/

Closed Access: (P)PNAS https://www.google.com/search?q=ppnas http://andrewgelman.com/2017/10/04/breaking-pnas-changes-slo...

Closed Access journals DO NOT serve as a quality filter. The unpaid peer-reviewers serve as a quality filter (and often a poot one anyway).

[Fomite]

Despite publishing in PLoS journals a fair amount, I'm not a huge fan of the actual customer experience of publishing on their platform. I once seriously gave up first authorship on a paper in exchange for not having to deal with PLoS Currents' submission system.

Similarly, the BMC-system appears to be having serious issues with turning around papers swiftly enough.

[indubitable]

Of course you're right, but the review process is connected to the journal. PLoS journals are very accepting and so they end up being seen as a repository for publications that could not get published elsewhere. That's not to say nothing of value is published there, but rather that if you take a random paper from one of their journals, it's going to be of a different quality than a random paper from the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

And like others have mentioned, a supplement is a great idea because of publication bias against things like negative results. However, I would again see this as supplementing and supplanting when I think most people here are gunning for the latter.

[esfandia]

I wonder if university libraries around the world could federate their efforts and take on the burden of publishing and hosting articles. The money they currently spend on subscriptions should more than cover the expenses.