[paisawalla]

I agree with your diagnosis, however I would not like the government to appoint editors of research journals: that seems rife with opportunities for abuse. Also, article selection is an editorial process, so I'd expect that government-run journals will quickly be targets of free speech lawsuits.

What are the core functions of a journal?

1. facilitate reviews

2. distribute articles selected through #1

It seems to me that #2 is where the potential for restrictive and exploitative business models really shows up. The curation function #1 should be something that can be accomplished at nominal expense. Universities should be able to fund that collaboratively for very low cost, pro-socially without a need to recuperate those costs. Why don't we see that? I suspect that it's the existing journal industry blocking such a development.

[advael]

I agree, the process of peer review is something that should probably be done by academic institutions with neither corporate nor governmental oversight, and seems like something they're mostly happy to do, as evidenced by so many journals getting the work of expert scholars as peer-reviewers for free. As someone in a different comment thread pointed out, part of the barrier for such a move is that funding decisions build journals in as a gatekeeper, so effectively funding is locked behind publication. It's possible that simply removing the publishers from the equation would create the result everyone but them seems to want "automagically"