
Potential White House open-access edict could upend scientific publishers - walterbell
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.2.20191219a/full/
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yummypaint
The only meaningful service jornals provide is coordination of peer review.
Reviewers are unpaid. Content is distributed electronically and there is
already well established non-commercial infrastructure (like arXiv) in place
for doing this. There are really two different issues at play here: The first
is that professional societies like the APS who do lots of essential work like
organizing conferences need to be funded more robustly than through membership
dues alone. The second is that the commercial academic publishing industry is
obsolete, and already had to be dragged kicking and screaming to reach the
level of open access we have now.

