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Your scientific society sounds bad, and essentially has morphed in to a publishing company.

Seriously, a society should not be funded by publication fees.

Personally I think it would be better for the societies to stay small and be funded by membership fees or grant funding (as part of out reach other activities, meetings etc on grants).

If you find it through publishing you can’t really complain about the rent seeking behavior of journals...

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Here is my hot take. Strictly speaking for APS, this funding model does not seem to be a big deal. If you are an active physicist in research, you are very likely to be part of an institution that has a subscription to the journals (university or national labs). If you are not an active physicist in research, the papers are probably prohibitively incomprehensible to you. I also think it makes sense for a society to publish journals. Societies facilitate the communication of research progress. This is clearly one of the goals of conferences. Papers in journals are usually a better format for communicating advances (more detail, can refer back to it at your leisure, peer reviewed, etc)

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