There do exist open access journals that are run cheaply with funding from some academic body. Maybe they don’t scale though.

I don't know about this publisher, but it must be noted that academic publishing is notorious for having some of the highest margins on the planet. As a business they are as close to a magical pot of gold as you could hope for.

Breaking their peculiar hold on research is taking decades. arXiv has existed for over 30 years, but physics journals still thrive.

They only have "a hold on research" because academia wants it that way. There's no legal obligation for any research org to publish in journals. They do it voluntarily, for reasons that have nothing to do with furthering science. And despite this, instead of demanding an end to journal dominated academic research, we just complain about the cost.

Nobody wants to deal with the big pink elephant, so instead we argue about who's gonna pick up the turd it left in the living room.

Astronomy does better than a fair few of the physics subfields at arxiv usage (optics is especially bad from what I hear).

This is a terrible comment at every level. First, it attacks a strawman argument. No one is clamouring for free "everything". Most rational people would agree that thousands of dollars/pounds/euros PER article is an insane markup when literally none of the value add is provided by journals. The role of a journal is essentially administrative, webhosting and some database management. Almost none of their work is technical or specialised.

Second, what would a fair processing charge be? Certainly not thousands of dollars. Here is just one journal that manages to provide the same level of service for the princely sum of EUR 75 if you submit an MS Word manuscript: https://www.wind-energy-science.net/about/article_processing...

Third, in no way are a blog and a scientific journal equivalent.

Do you know that all the scientists referee for these journals for free ?

I don't think this is true in general. Certainly, they aren't paid by the publisher, but I'd imagine most referees are in paid employment with institutions that expect them to review the occasional manuscript as part of their job.

Nowhere in my contract or in anyone else's contract (as far as I know) it is written that I need to referee papers.

People do it as a service to the community. And I don't necessarily ask to be payed for that, I was just answering the point about "I want everything to be free all the time and never pay for anything". We pay with our work to referee the papers. Sure there are extra costs to host the papers, typeset, but they should be nowhere near 2.5k GBP per paper.

Academic jobs are weird, right? I think trying to write down contract that specifies everything involved would be pretty challenging.

At any rate, the last time I was employed as astrophysics faculty, my offer letter told me that I should “engage in scholarly activities”. I certainly interpreted that as an invitation to review the odd paper on the university's dime.

> They all literally just come down to "I want everything to be free all the time and never pay for anything"

It's not "free". We've already paid for the content in the journals through taxes. Most research is funded by government grants, carried out by scientists paid with public money.

The writing and the reviewing and most of the formatting is also done by scientists. The value that a journal provides on top of that is minimal. It's rent-seeking behaviour on content where the actual value has already been paid for.

So tell your representatives in government to stop putting government funded research into journals. (They won't stop, and the reason why is the same reason why journals have those big profits)

> They won't stop

They are already stopping: https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-open-access-policy

> the reason why is the same reason

And which reason is that?

Some people argue we might consider abolishing (or at least ignoring) institutionalized peer review, e.g. Liam Kofi Bright. The blog post/Arxiv model seems to work reasonably well with no fees or formal referees, and was more or less how science worked in previous centuries. What's more, if formal peer review can't prevent something like the modern replication crisis, and creates publishing incentives widely acknowledged to be pathological, is it really that valuable?