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But journals do have an economic restriction. More pages cost more money and the subscription fees only go so far. I suppose page charges might balance some of the editorial costs, but those are also limiting. They can't be too high or they'll chase away submissions.

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> More pages cost more money and the subscription fees only go so far

arxiv.org's budget is instructive: around $2M for 181K new submissions and a digital library of around 2M articles. Works out to about $12 per new submission.

For a reviewed journal or conference, presumably all published papers would have to be reviewed, much as they are currently by volunteer reviewers who review all papers before publication or rejection. If Prof. Lee is right then reviewing effort could go down overall due to fewer resubmissions.

12 USD is the current cost per submission. But I do not think that they need to 2x their budget to handle 2x the amount of articles. Marginal costs per article will be lower.

But your point stands, this stuff costs real money. So I just donated 100 USD to Arxiv, as they host a few of my papers. And thousands of other articles that I have read, for free and super accessibly.

Modern journals don't actually print all that much, and I'd expect the marginal cost of publishing additional papers to be very low.

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