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Comment by freeone3000 | Hacker News Reader

Mostly papers are thrown up on arxiv. I don't see why we should have to pay to host our own papers when we could just host our own papers. Seriously, three grand? How many months of AWS S3 does that pay for?

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In my experience those high fees usually only apply when publishing open access. In our lab we publish using the free closed access method, and then a free version goes on PubMed (potentially after an embargo). So the research is available for free, the lab still gets the journal prestige, and it doesn't cost the lab anything. This is by no means a perfect system, but it's not as dire as a lot of these articles want us to think.

Unfortunately, it does cost your institution a lot, in terms of the subscription to that journal.

Only math/physics/CS papers are put on arxiv. These are a small fraction of the total academic and industrial research output. In my own field, earth science, there is an arxiv-clone (eartharxiv.org) that is a few months old. I bet the majority of earth scientists (and certainly 90% of geologists) have never heard of arxiv.

Furthermore, many people just put pre-prints on arxiv etc. and don't update after peer review. Peer review is painful at best and quite flawed but the median paper is actually better after it, and many papers rightly don't make it through. Having open-access curated journals makes a lot of this better.

Because as a researcher, you're not paying to have your papers hosted or even to have the feedback process facilitated, but you're paying so you can say your articles have been published in <journal x>, which helps you when applying for grants or tenure.

It's not the hosting, but the publication process, I think.

I am not involved in this stuff, just read quite some posts on StackExchange Academia.

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