Reviewers do not get paid. In many scientific fields, authors use LaTeX together with a well-defined style to format their own articles. The cost can be minimal, as has been demonstrated by many new journals (see https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an... for an analysis by an expert in his field who started what may very well become the most prestigious journal in that field and is freely accessible.)

Just to clarify: Is your position that research written by academic scientists, funded by government grants and university budgets, reviewed by volunteers, and proofread and typeset by the researchers themselves, handed off to a journal to put in a print edition or stick a pdf on their website, should belong exclusively to the corporate owners of the journal for a period of ~100 years after publication, with no profit flowing back to the university, the researcher, or the reviewers?

If this is not your position, can you clarify what you think scientific publishing should look like?

> because it distracts from the job that they are there for.

What is the “job scientific papers are there for”, if not sharing knowledge with other scientists and the people of the world?

As for your silly garbage truck / tank analogy: instead of these, we have buses, which work much better for the task.

This.

Journals made a lot of sense before the age of the internet, when they actually did have to do a lot of work to coordinate the activity of physically collecting research papers, mailing them for reviews, paying dedicated people for typesetting and so on. Although the cost of all of this has almost vanished now that tools for editing are so accessible and delivery costs are inexistent, publishers still charge ridiculous sums for papers produced mostly from public money simply because of their prestige.

Your analogy is flawed in that a garbage truck or tank isn't designed to provide a lift and providing a lift would incur signicant additional cost to make it suitable for rides.

The same is not true for releasing papers. Government-funded research is done for the public good and its purpose is consumption. Releasing it furthers that purpose. Second, releasing it to public shouldn't incur significant additional cost.

First point: the govt is going to pay for it, by paying the open access fee. Research itself should be freely available, it's only fair to return it to the public which funded it.

Your second point is null, since the filtering job is 100% free (journal editors themselves do little filtering, whenever they are in doubt they forward the job to zero-paid reviewers).

I don't think that's a sound analogy. When does getting a lift in a garbage truck allow you the opportunity to further humanity's knowledge to the same extent as being able to access papers and do some research. These are rather different things.

Also, isn't it true that a lot (or most) of the peer review is done on a volunteer basis?

Actually is there any journal that actually pays reviewers?