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The only tangible benefit I can read into that is peer review, which isn’t paid for by the journals at all. Open access journals have demonstrated the ability to have effective peer review journals without the middlemen.

Otherwise you haven’t mentioned anything of actual value.

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OA journals are a middleman too. They typically charge, just in a different way. In fact, popular OA journals can have much higher profit margins than your average subscription journal. If you're advocating for free publishing (whether OA or not) I'd challenge the belief that a system can scale to the current needs of the academic community without charging someone (institutions, governments, authors) and fees of some kind. You can certainly make the argument that the world would be a better place with all actors in the endeavor being non-profits, but that still doesn't at all mean free publishing.

“Open access journals have demonstrated the ability to have effective peer review journals without the middlemen.”

Open access journals are basically the same as traditional journals, they just charge authors up front, rather than readers later. I don’t understand what you mean by your sentence above - they haven’t demonstrated anything close to what you claim.

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