You ignored the best argument: what does PLOS (a non-profit) do with those $2000 they charge the author? Nobody is disputing that Elsevier et al make a profit

You ignored the best argument: what does PLOS (a non-profit) do with those $2000 they charge the author? Nobody is disputing that Elsevier et al make a profit that isn't entirely deserved. You don't have to argue that point. But that glosses over the fact that their revenue is absolutely not pure profit. PLOS shows that there are costs associated with publishing, even if you get a lot of the work for free. Those $2000 are the value that publishers provide. Maybe they're charging $5000 for those $2000 right now, and that's morally suspect. But when that business model is destroyed, someone has to come up with a way to finance those $2000 of value by other means. Also: > Publication bias is a thing. A hugely significant thing. "Publication bias" isn't the arbitrary injection of a publisher's opinions into articles or something like that. It just describes the fact that more surprising, or positive results are more likely to get published. Doing away with publishers won't have any effect on this mechanism. Any sort of ranking or discovery mechanism will ultimately prefer the more spectacular result, because that's what people are looking for. In the specific case of pharmacology, mandatory pre-registration of trials, and all-encompassing meta-analysis of those is a good strategy, and it's completely orthogonal to the process of publishing the paper.