> Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial journal world (and originally they did come from more benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism.
I generally agree with you here
> A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without having some judgement and bias applied. One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors?
But the editors in the majority of journals are already volunteers. They might get some minor amount of money for their work (we are typically talking maybe $100 a month max), but that's it. The only journals that have full time editors are the highest impact journals like nature and science, but it shows again and again that they are not really domain experts and are not necessarily acting in the interest of science. I actually have heard a nature editor say "our business is to sell journals, not to publish the best science".
>There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal will we select to have the prestige?
Well if the big universities and funding agencies would push, this would happen quite fast.
> But yes, they have become parasites, who prey on the free labor of eager young academics, take their work and sell access to it, enforce copyrights on knowledge created by taxpayer money, and bundle useless journals in with important ones so everyone has to pay more.
> It's in the public interest for academic fields and the universities to come up with a reasonable alternative.