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> These deals will often have discounts if they publish their papers on this publisher. I've never heard of such a scheme. But on to your larger point: one th

> These deals will often have discounts if they publish their papers on this publisher. I've never heard of such a scheme. But on to your larger point: one thing I'd say is that the needs of academics varies greatly from field to field. There are reasons CS works totally differently than lots of other fields. There's a reason arXiv started in physics. Fields with logically provable assertions and testable algorithms are a lot easier to assess the quality of the content without relying on the peer review and journal acceptance signaling effect (although in CS the conference acts as that signaling effect just as strongly I'd argue). Preprint servers are great, and certainly provide value and are a piece of the puzzle. In some fields (CS, Math, Physics) that can be a pretty large piece of the puzzle. But in many other fields there's a much greater need for expert curation and vetting.

Iv 9y ago
> But in many other fields there's a much greater need for expert curation and vetting. Let's remind something that is too often forgotten: peer review, while still useful, is NOT paid by the publisher. It is done for free by the peers. Yes, the publisher manages that and gets paid to organize it. The complex, high-educated job of peer-review is done for free, the automatizable, simple job of passing emails around is paid. Don't worry, I am sure we can find university staff or even a simple emailing script that can replace this function easily. I think that the reason it started with CS is much more mundane: computer scientists are much more likely to know that hosting a PDF is very easy and costs zero, and will probably be more confident in using tools like LaTeX.