(edits for structure. disclaimer: these views are my own, not my employers' or the communities' or publishers') Publishers do provide a necessary service: fina

(edits for structure. disclaimer: these views are my own, not my employers' or the communities' or publishers') Publishers do provide a necessary service: financial support for meetings. One significant problem with "Open Access Everywhere!" is that many conferences are a huge financial net loss even after the registration fees, so they need the publisher's financial support to actually hold a meeting. In this way, most of the smaller conferences that publishers support are subsidized by the heavy hitters. It would be a shame for those smaller meetings to disappear. It's easier for top tier conferences to choose how to publish. For example, in computer vision, CVPR and ICCV (two top-tier conferences in the field) are currently co-sponsored by IEEE (the publisher) and the Computer Vision Foundation, which is run by well-respected members of the computer vision community. As part of this arrangement, papers from these conferences appear in IEEE Xplore as well as the CVF's open access website, free for everyone: http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/menu.py http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/menu.py Of course, only a very small number of heavy-hitting conferences can afford the kind of leverage that CVPR and ICCV needed to pull this arrangement off. In their unique situation, everyone (publishers and academics) benefit from the arrangement. That's not usually the case. In an open-access-only "Ditch the Publishers!" world, it's unclear how we can continue to support smaller conferences. Not every field has big industry players that can sponsor the meeting, and not many students or advisors have enough grant money to afford increased registration fees.