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Comment by fredbo22 | Hacker News Reader

It's a beautiful sentiment.

Who's going to pay for the layout and editing and filtering? The people at Elsevier do something for their money.

I'm happy with going to all author-circulated preprints, but I'm afraid that all of the archival work of the journals is a pretty good thing.

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I have been publishing at Elsevier, and the editing process was a nightmare. The "layout and editing and filtering" is not performed by skilled editors, it is performed on an Amazon Mechanical Turk level. There was no improvement for the reader over what my co-authors and me had submitted, just a lot of back and forth to prevent numerous new errors to be slipped in.

I'd gladly pay a one-time fee for a good editor to bring a paper into a better shape, to cover these costs.

Ehm... The same people that currently do so at Open Access journals, or at institutional repositories?

In many cases, "layout" is a standard LaTeX/Word template done every few years. "Editing" on text-level is done by the authors, based on feedback from reviewers that aren't paid. Filtering is done based on the same reviewer feedback.

Coordination and archiving are valuable, but don't match the prices asked by some.

Why do we need to pay for expensive layout, in an era where nobody reads the print journal any more? A Word document exported to PDF would work just as well as far as actual science is concerned.

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