That is not true, because it is possible to get rid of the publishers entirely.
The only thing that would be needed are people in charge of formatting and such, because some fields do not use LaTeX yet (this need concerns mostly biology, chemistry, and medicine). But that could be easily covered by small local businesses for a teeny tiny fraction of the costs of current subscriptions.
The other thing that costs money already exists: archives that take care of making papers available and preserve them for the future. These services would need to be reinforced but that cost is also ridiculous compared to what is currently spent as subscription (the operational cost of arXiv for example are only a bit more than what a mid sized university pays for Elsevier subscription alone…).
The large open access journals that don't have independent funding charge rates within the same order of magnitude. What evidence do you have that an order of magnitude reduction is actually possible at scale? How do you explain the expenses of both traditional publishers and open access ones, and how would you eliminate them?
First, APCs have not been calculated with regard to the costs of publishing, but rather with the goal of maintaining the same level of profits for publishers' shareholders.
Second, I know what I said is possible because some journals already do it, and there is no scale issues at all here. Journal management is entirely decentralized. One journal = one editorial board.
Let me illustrate this with one of the possible models which is called "overlay journals".
In an overlay journal, papers are uploaded for example to arXiv, and submitted for review by giving the link to the paper on arXiv. Then the editorial board (composed of researchers) does its job as it would in a traditional journal: it sends the papers to review to other researchers of the relevant field (well, at least they try). The reviewers also do their job as they would in traditional publishing. And papers are accepted as is, with modifications, or rejected, again, as usual.
Now what constitutes an issue of the journal is a list of links to the accepted versions (repositories such as arXiv can keep track of the successive versions of a paper) of the paper in arXiv.
There, same level of scientific requirements, no publishers, literaly no costs for anyone except arXiv (which is already paid for by public institutions), and researchers time, that is already spent and not paid for in the traditional system.
If you really want double-blind peer reviews you can use one of the open journal systems free software or as people currently do, public services such as easychair or scienceconf to organize the reviewing phase.
The only thing that is still necessary for some fields, as I already said, is the proper layout work. The ideal situation is that each university or group of university hires a few professional in charge of this work and who can do it in close contact with the authors of the paper. A few salaries costs less than the millions currently spend each year by each university for journal subscriptions, and the job would be done better than it currently is by publishers who often outsource it to low-salary regions of the world to increase their profits.
> How do you explain the expenses of both traditional publishers and open access ones, and how would you eliminate them?
By not granting any copyright to publicly funded work. That doesn't actually prohibit a publisher from charging readers for access, but it would require them to charge the market price for publication of digital works out of copyright. Then we see if competition can significantly drive down costs.
The result would be that publishers charge for publication, similar to current open access options. It could be that greater usage of open access would bring down the cost, but I'm not sure.
Definitely the number of grants would go down as the cost of publishing starts being factored in, although this may be partly or fully outweighed by the reduction in universities' costs.
> Definitely the number of grants would go down as the cost of publishing starts being factored in, although this may be partly or fully outweighed by the reduction in universities' costs.
Universities are paying essentially all of the cost one way or another now, how could it not be fully outweighed? It would be more than fully outweighed because the universities would no longer have to pay the publishers the amount that constitutes the monopoly rent from the copyright.
Meanwhile the public gets free access to the research which increases its utility.
1. It's different universities, including ones that don't directly fund research, and so more money in their pocket won't directly lead to more science funding. Also libraries.
2. There are many places to put extra money in a university (add to endowment, expand, etc).
>It would be more than fully outweighed because the universities would no longer have to pay the publishers the amount that constitutes the monopoly rent from the copyright.
Why do you think profit margins would go down? The "rent", to the extent a 30% margin is rent, is from the need to publish in prestigious journals. Copyright just affects how that rent is collected, but it's not clear to me how that would reduce the rent. (It may go down because people become more hesitant to publish due to the increased cost which forces them to lower their price to get more papers. But that wouldn't be such a good thing.)
arXiv charges neither for reading nor for publication. And for-profit publishers have to be profitable to exist, which necessarily incurs costs on authors and readers.
Arxiv is not peer reviewed. If you think we should get rid of that, make that argument; but keeping the review model and getting rid of access fees would increase costs elsewhere.
Regarding profit: sure, you could set up a nonprofit to do the same job. You'll end up reducing costs by 20-40%, even assuming you don't have higher costs because of lower scale/lack of experience/etc.
For other essentials like food, I've seen stories about nonprofits that get large groups together and buy in bulk. Co-ops are basically the same idea. Using a non profit to reduce costs has been done.
But we don't even need the publishers at all! There are already free venues for publishing documents!
It's also not even obvious that (anonymous pre-publication) peer review is better than just publishing everything and letting anyone and everyone comment on it just like anything else shared publicly on the web. I mean, for just one example, it's a big deal that researchers don't already publish everything!
If we don't need them, why are they still being used?
You may think peer review is over-rated. The response should be to convince others of that and get them to stop using it, not complain about the high cost of peer review/journals/etc.
The peer review process is entirely independent from publishers and can (and do!) exist without them.
> not complain about the high cost of peer review
Peer review is not paid for by publishers. It is organized by researchers who are part of editorial boards of journals or of program committees of conferences. And it is done voluntarily by researchers as part of their normal work / duties to their scientific community.
> If we don't need them, why are they still being used?
They are "still being used" mainly by researchers and grant agencies. But this is only a fraction of the number of people who care to read the results of the research work.
Researchers think of their research first, public access second. They think they need to publish with the incumbents to secure their future research. This is because the incumbents own the most respected journal names and have them in tight grip. For most researchers, there is currently no easy alternative way to get credit for their work.
But there are alternatives, it just isn't as easy and convenient for researchers to explore and start using them. The reason most of the people oppose current publishers such as Elsevier is not that researchers do not need them, but it is that society does not need them. It is because business has injected itself in a place where it prevents rather than enables society to benefit from the research.
