I think publishers provide the valuable services like proofreading, aid the peer-review process and content filtering. They SUCK at distribution though and shou

I think publishers provide the valuable services like proofreading, aid the peer-review process and content filtering. They SUCK at distribution though and should not be in the distribution business. Now who is good at distribution? arXiv is. Their costs are less than 7$ per publication, they are seriously lean and efficient. <quote> How much does arXiv cost to operate? The annual budget for arXiv is $400,000. With over 60,000 new submissions per year one may think of this as an effective cost of <$7 per submission. Alternatively, with over 30,000,000 full-text downloads per year this is an effective cost of <1.4 cents per download. We believe that arXiv is an extremely cost-effective service. </quote> http://arxiv.org/help/support/faq http://arxiv.org/help/support/faq Now the question is how to keep the useful aspects of publishing and not have to pay for them. An army secretaries, a bunch of typesetting gurus and some method for peer-review... tall order i know.