[amaajemyfren]

You are not wrong and I agree but eventually I suspect there will be some project management (following up on peer reviewers, winnowing out the low quality papers, etc) that will need to be paid for on top of the server and bandwidth costs. Whatever service comes about it will need to collect some money. My view is it should be small in the single digit dollar space for unlimited monthly access for every paper that was funded by a tax payer in the world.

[j-pb]

This sounds like there is currently a mechanism for winnowing the crap, but we currently don't really have this either.

On the contrary, because researchers are driven to publish publish publish, they often reheat the same paper over and over again with minor modifications, or just go conference shopping until they get an acceptance.

With less publishing pressure, qualitu would go up automatically.

Watson and Crick published papers only every couple years. This wouldn't work today at all.

Science needs to go back to publishing when you habe something to say, not just to fullfill your quota.