[TheAmazingIdiot]

A mail server and website combination is cheap to build. Your only cost is bandwidth.

The only real cost is bandwidth. That's when you have the schools host these cheap servers. "instead of 15 million USD, we want to colo. Deal?"

And to completely trounce your idea, publishing is easy for journals. It's called "load page and press print". There's hardly any reason to print tomes that can easily loaded ip on a web page as needed. And if you need a bound book, go to lulu or other JIT publisher.

[cmsmith]

Publishing is not referring to printing the physical journals (no one is arguing that those should be free).

Publishing refers to the work done by editors, copyeditors, typesetters, etc. Without those paid employees the quality of journals would drop significantly.

[TheAmazingIdiot]

You mean all the work the grad students do when they write the content.... And all the work other grad students do when they typeset it? Sure. Apologist.

[Kliment]

Very few people understand how the academic publishing industry works, so don't be so fast to smack this person down. The fact is that the authors do all the content and technical editing work, and unpaid volunteers do all the peer review work, and depending on journal, either underpaid or unpaid editors do the coordinating between then, with the exception of very few top journals. The publishers generally do the typesetting, which is a minimal amount of work compared to everything else, and hold the exclusive license to distribute the work, which is essentially all the value of the paper. Most will force authors to give them the exclusive right to destroy people's lives for copyright reasons without the author's consent.

[TheAmazingIdiot]

You're right Kliment. I was too harsh, only due to my anger. It's also a sore point to me and quite a few of my friends.

I'm sorry, cmsmith.

[streptomycin]

So by your judgement, all these folks could be sacked and nothing of value would be lost? http://www.plos.org/about/people/staff/

[TheAmazingIdiot]

"So by your judgement, all these folks could be sacked and nothing of value would be lost?"

I would argue that value would be gained by sacking these people (and organizations).

Most of the money they (and other journals) uses is dependent on excessive licensing fees charged to universities. The universities turn around and add that to each person's tuition.

And all the work the journal publishes WAS owned by the students of the very university, until the journal demands transfer of copyright to the journal... So they can sell them back work at 1000X the profit.

By definition, they are parasites. What we need is a good anti-parasitic medicine.

[streptomycin]

We're talking about open access stuff like PLoS, though. They don't charge licensing fees to universities, they don't typically demand copyright transfer, etc. Try to stay on topic.

Basically.. the question is, is it possible for an open access journal to be run for orders of magnitude less money than every existing open access journal currently in existence? You seem to think the answer is "definitely yes", but you haven't explained why. What is your insight that has been missed by so many others?

Furthermore, thinking of finances of open access publishers, even PLoS has its issues at its current prices http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080702/full/454011a.html