[akjj]

I agree with you that incumbent commercial publishers are sucking up a lot of money that could be better spent elsewhere. Where I disagree is on the specific numbers. It's not about the publishing platform or physical printing but the administration of journal's operations. The editorial board and the referees work for "free" (which actually means paid for by someone else, usually universities), but the management and administration does not.

I point to PLoS as essentially the model you're asking for. It's a non-profit publisher started by open-access advocates working as researchers. There are no investors making a profit and they're mission is to spread open-access as a model, and they end up charging $2200+ per article for most of their journals. If that's the number they came up with, then I'm led to believe that that's what it costs to publish a journal, at least in the biosciences. As I said, there are small journals that operate for free, but if you look at large-scale open-access operations, started by idealists, I don't think you're going to find any that sustainably gets by with article charges less than around $1500.

For comparison, when I looked at Elsevier's finances, it seemed that they're charging roughly $5000 per article and half of that goes to their operations and half is profit. So their costs are roughly the same as PLoS, but they charge twice as much in order to make a substantial profit.

As for why I felt the need to correct you, I think it's because I think in general people ignore the real monetary costs associated with open-access publishing. I believe that author-pays open-access is the way of the future, but getting there will mean that researchers will have to find ways to pay these fees when they haven't had to pay before. In principle, this just involves redirecting money from subscriptions to pay author charges and there'd even be money left over, but actually performing that switch across thousands of institutions is not simple. Too often I run into the attitude that for-profit publishing is charging money for a trivial job, and so people wonder why it hasn't been replaced. However, the truth is that they're performing an important and real task with real costs, while also over-charging for it, and that's not going to be replaced overnight.

[p4bl0]

I guess this varies a lot across domains, but in computer science for instance, most of the management and administration is done by researchers too, using platforms such as EasyChair for example. So there isn't any cost here either. At the end when all the work is done, the publisher receives the work and only has to put its stamp on it. Okay I may be exaggerating: last time I published in a Springer journal they did two additional things to my paper: they changed the page number color from black to blue, and they changed all the internal references to other section from "Sec. n" to "Sect. n"… Clearly that must have cost the $3500 in APCs that they asked to make the paper open access.

Of course neither me nor my lab could afford that so I just went with the regular way, signed their fucking copyright release form while cursing a lot against them, and in the end didn't really care because in my field (cryptology), most of the papers are on the IACR ePrint Archive even before they are published (including mine) and they are updated there when they change.

So, my personal experience and my research on the subject (I have done a lot of work on open access, see http://pablo.rauzy.name/openaccess/introduction.html which is only available in French for now) say that no, the publishers work is most of the time not that important: for instance in my case if the conference or journal just published a list of links to the accepted versions of the paper on the IACR ePrint archive, the cost of publishing would decrease drastically and the quality of the publication would not change at all.