I actually work as a developer for non-profit society. I agree that having paywalls around content is bad and prevents the dissemination and access to fundamental knowledge. We generate most of our operational revenue through journal subscriptions. I know from working here that it does indeed cost a fair amount of money to provide both the IT and editorial support for peer review and archiving/presenting the data forever.
We are trying to get authors to embrace an open access model where they pay a fee of $1500 or so to make their paper Creative Commons licensed and free to read for all. I do think there is a value for peer review and it is harder than commonly thought because science is so specialized these days.
An area which I think is woefully underserved is the science press. In our journals, I can barely understand anything published as it requires specialist knowledge in small areas of study. Just reading papers does not really keep someone knowledgable about anything but their very specialized sub domain. Peer review in itself is nice but it is important to provide accessibility to what is going on in science via non specialist explanations of published works.
So I agree that the model of paywalling a bunch of PDFs is horribly broken, and should be disrupted. I think scholarly publishing in general can really benefit from something like a one time fee to publish your paper and make it accessible to all not only in regards to paywalls, but in regards to the material being accessible to non specialists.
We are trying to get authors to embrace an open access model where they pay a fee of $1500 or so to make their paper Creative Commons licensed and free to read for all. I do think there is a value for peer review and it is harder than commonly thought because science is so specialized these days.
An area which I think is woefully underserved is the science press. In our journals, I can barely understand anything published as it requires specialist knowledge in small areas of study. Just reading papers does not really keep someone knowledgable about anything but their very specialized sub domain. Peer review in itself is nice but it is important to provide accessibility to what is going on in science via non specialist explanations of published works.
So I agree that the model of paywalling a bunch of PDFs is horribly broken, and should be disrupted. I think scholarly publishing in general can really benefit from something like a one time fee to publish your paper and make it accessible to all not only in regards to paywalls, but in regards to the material being accessible to non specialists.
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