As a matter of fact, I have been studying the economics of open access publishing. It's important to distinguish the price of open access publishing from the co

As a matter of fact, I have been studying the economics of open access publishing. It's important to distinguish the price of open access publishing from the cost of open access publishing. Commercial publishers are hopeless because they are of course trying to make the most profit they can by obfuscating costs, practicing price discrimination, and shifting licensing fees through transitional models. ACM, IEEE, and others use their revenue from publishing to fund various other activities (like lobbying or outreach). There is a very interesting recent article about the _cost_ of publishing here: https://f1000research.com/articles/10-20/v2 https://f1000research.com/articles/10-20/v2 Arxiv is useful for making stuff available, but peer review and professional publishing are still necessary for academics to advance and enhance their reputation. The peer review process is what typically establishes the quality of scientific work. One thing that software people often overlook is the cost and value of human copy editing. Scholarly work often benefits from having a skilled editor correct grammar and formatting. Metadata and citations are incredibly important, and are usually mangled badly by lazy authors. If a journal accepts Microsoft Word (which is very common outside math and CS), then it has to be typeset to produce consistent PDF. All of this human effort costs money; perhaps a few hundred dollars per article.