Why not some type of model that has universities support it, and get interested parties to peer-review them (much as is done now, since peer-reviewers aren't paid). Make it a non-profit and basically the universities come together to subsidize the hosting of the articles. Get rid of multiple journals completely, and instead have a great tagging and filtering system.
Academic institutions have financial incentives in seeing that their faculty publish. When faculty get grants, there's almost always an overhead component that goes to the grantee's institution.
Maybe colleges/unis could explicitly pay faculty for their occasional service as peer reviewers. And/or offer some "softer" incentive, like an incremental advance towards tenure. The financial component could come out of grant overhead. A combo of these could motivate and pay for good curation.
Non-profit member-run organizations come to mind. “Pay” for publication with credits earned doing volunteer review work, or something like that. Or even just a pay to publish with a non profit mandate and board elected by the published researchers would eliminate much of the complained about incentive problem.
The problem here is having a for profit publisher, not the way in which that publisher makes its revenue.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. But even don't have them pay for credits. Have a set fee, based on the number of universities in the organization, and then those who help subsidize storage can upload for free and get it peer-reviewed. Let the reviewers work for free, or even use some of the money to hire reviewers, and have authors tag their work and then be placed in the correct categories.
The whole problem with money and profit can be solved in as simple a way as making it an NPO.
