| Don't get me wrong - I don't think that the existing system works particularly well or is value for money, I just wanted to point out that there's much more going on than hosting a crappy website. ;) > only familiar with math publishing Fair enough. I'm only really familiar with the life sciences. > Automated typesetting is a solved problem This isn't as simple outside of CS/EE/maths unfortunately. Most academic researchers couldn't tell you what LaTeX is. > As for your cost of $99/article, the Arxiv costs $400k/year arXiv is awesome but it's a preprint repository not a journal (whether or not a repo + engaged community is as 'good' as a peer reviewed journal is probably a whole other thread... physicists still usually publish in journals, even though they use arXiv constantly and put their manuscripts up there first) I picked $99 because it's the number PeerJ (also awesome) is suggesting. In reality life science journals will charge you $1k+... > are you really going to claim this darknet is more reliable than mirroring articles I don't make that claim, academic librarians and publishers do. (if you prefer you can swap out this cost and replace it with the cost of hiring somebody to do ops for you on an occasional, freelance basis to handle things going wrong, moving to new cloud providers etc. over a 25 year period...). > Similarly, paying membership fees to the other big publishers to keep little guys out of the market I don't think I explained this the right way. The fees are to help maintain common services that all publishers then use - for example, to ensure that given an identifier you can always find the full text of a paper (URLs being unstable over even relatively short timeframes), to mint and store metadata about those identifiers to make sure the right people get credit when cited etc. Those services are unquestionably valuable and get used by millions of scientists every day. > If it weren't for reputation effects and agency costs (i.e., if the market were competitive), this process would cost well under $99/article I disagree but believe that you should be right. People like PeerJ, eLife, arXiv and others need to keep exploring alternative ways of doing things until we hit on a sustainable model. |
Plenty of countries have national/legal deposit libraries (my country has six of them) and the costs of running them are a rounding error in national terms. You can hardly claim an electronic national library would cost more to run than a physical library - much smaller volume of stuff to store, no staff to retrieve and shelve documents, no in person visitors.