No, and you don't understand the current scientific ecosystem. Researchers are paid for their work through salaries and grants, and therefore benefit from open access. Publishers are not. That's why PLOS must charge authors a fee.

> Researchers are paid for their work through salaries and grants

researchers work 40+ hour weeks for months or years. the majority of the work in publishing is reviewing that research, which is outsourced to peers for free. the actual publication is a tiny part (time-investment wise) of the total value.

By all means, compensate the peer reviewers in addition. But you trivialize what publishers do. The role of the impartial gatekeeper is crucial in our current system. Publishers select the reviewers, analyze the reviews, and accept or reject. Orchestrating all this, by itself, is expensive! That $2000 figure for PLOS would be even higher if they paid reviewers.

Further, peer reviewers review for free because they can afford to--they are being paid by government and industry. Publishers cannot survive without being paid.

> Publishers select the reviewers, analyze the reviews, and accept or reject. Orchestrating all this, by itself, is expensive.

If academics can peer review, they can do the analysing of reviews and accepting/rejecting, too. Even for-profit publishers often put all that work on an unpaid editorial board.

Also, the costs do not have to be so high that they make Wiley or Springer-type for-profit journals the only way of publishing scholarship. In my own field, the most respected journals are printed by learned societies founded on the basis of an endowment or national academies of science. Since the labour and coordination is already done for free here by academics -- just like with many for-profit journals -- the only additional costs are typesetting and coordination with the printer/distributor, and it turns out that these costs are not so high that you have to lock your content down. These journals do not even have to charge submission fees like other journals in the "open access" movement claim is necessary; it just all doesn't cost that much.

You argue that publishing does not need to be as expensive as $2000. Fair enough. I would be happy if we can agree that publishers do something, and that piracy is not an alternative. That point seems to be lost on the majority of commenters here.

Well, I’m afraid that you’re not going to get any agreement from me. The whole point of my post is that, because the vast majority of the journal production process is carried out through the labour of unpaid academics – the only added value from publishers (coordination with printer/distributor) is insignificant and certainly isn’t worth locking this knowledge down.

So, piracy is a great solution in the short term, and in the long run there should be a return of journals to learned societies. After all, that is where many of them were originally published anyway before the for-profits bought them up (promising to save on labour and ensure better quality, but in fact unpaid labour is still used and the quality of editing and typesetting has dropped drastically now that for-profit publishers often demand camera-ready copy with no quality inventions of their own).

> Publishers select the reviewers, analyze the reviews, and accept or reject.

all this tells me is that there's a serious lack of adequate tools or some common, open platform to facilitate this. it was hard [expensive] to collaborate on sourcecode before Github; now it isnt. it was difficult to research prior art for patents, now it isnt via patents.stackexchange.

I agree, editorial committees based on a software workflow could be a real competitor to the current publishers. I'd caution that (1) everything sounds easy from a high level view, when we don't see the complexity, and (2) that the hardest problems are not technical, but social.

In my discipline, publishers simply agree to publish a journal with a given editor. The idea they are selecting the editor is wrong - they wouldn't know how. They do no scientific work at all. Usually, they benefit from the status quo: a famous journal is with a given publisher, and to publish there we have to pay them a fee.

Ok, maybe we can replace the lot of them with a website. But the way I see it, collaboration platforms like Wikipedia, Facebook, and GitHub are valuable, and someone has to maintain the website. I wouldn't agree that this problem is "capital-s Solved", and it certainly isn't solved by piracy.