In many fields, this change is a reflection of the shift in costs and responsibility for publication. I'll speak of conference proceedings in CS, since that's

In many fields, this change is a reflection of the shift in costs and responsibility for publication. I'll speak of conference proceedings in CS, since that's what I know best (but these are roughly the equivalent of journals in other fields - peer reviewed, 10-20 pages per article, etc.) 20 years ago, the process involved the creation of a physical artifact -- bound paper, handed out to participants, mailed to subscribers, etc. This is a fairly non-trivial undertaking, certainly costing quite a few thousand dollars. As of a few years ago, the last of the major conferences in my area stopped creating printed proceedings. Along with that goes away the need (desire?) to ensure precise formatting rules, etc. -- the job of the typesetter is gone. We just submit PDFs, and everyone does their own. The other "costs" of a journal or conference were already borne by the research community -- most of our conferences and journals are all-volunteer. It's a decentralized cost spread across the salaries of everyone in the community. In our model, at least, the role of the publisher is greatly diminished. They provide some hosting, some indexing... and not much else. Not all fields are like that. Science and Nature, for example, have paid editors. Fine. Happy to pay for that. The shift in costs happened a while ago - the costs are probably in the range of $10-$100 per paper now, compared to quite a bit more before.