Oh dear, the burden of organizing peer-review and of consolidating some sort of "quality" stamp (I said "some sort of") is much more expensive than "nothing".
I am not pro-Elsevier, I am just stating a fact.
I am not pro-Elsevier, I am just stating a fact.
I do know that reviewing is free (I have done it).
What is expensive is paying the typesetters to place the movable type in various places, and to create plates with the various graphics. Oh wait, we don't need to do that anymore.
At this point, there is no rational justification for what Elsevier is doing now except greed. They actually have some other services that makes sense, but this lock on academic papers is simply a historical accident that is no longer relevant.
That might finally break (or finally justif) Elsevier and their ilk.
Everybody likes money, but I'm also not sure that's the way to go either. It would be great if reviewing directly impacted people's academic/research careers; I suspect the ability to review well is highly correlated with the ability to successfully run a research group. However, there are lots of thorny issues involving power and interpersonal relationships.
Reviewing others' work is rather tedious and I think it will be a challenge for any fully open platform to demonstrate that it will not be a waste of time to do peer reviews on them.
Per subject, per journal, the same person who edits a journal today at Elsevier could do the same thing for the same salary at a university consortium-backed non-profit.
I mean: corporations do not exist in a vacuum, they (usually) DO provide benefits to the society also.
I insist: I am not trying to defend abuses, I am trying to clarify that a for-profit corporation dealing with those many editorial issues is not bad per se.
Lol that's also done by volunteers.