You argue that publishing does not need to be as expensive as $2000. Fair enough. I would be happy if we can agree that publishers do something, and that piracy is not an alternative. That point seems to be lost on the majority of commenters here.
Well, I’m afraid that you’re not going to get any agreement from me. The whole point of my post is that, because the vast majority of the journal production process is carried out through the labour of unpaid academics – the only added value from publishers (coordination with printer/distributor) is insignificant and certainly isn’t worth locking this knowledge down.
So, piracy is a great solution in the short term, and in the long run there should be a return of journals to learned societies. After all, that is where many of them were originally published anyway before the for-profits bought them up (promising to save on labour and ensure better quality, but in fact unpaid labour is still used and the quality of editing and typesetting has dropped drastically now that for-profit publishers often demand camera-ready copy with no quality inventions of their own).
