Wanna publish for free? There's plenty of free blog hosting sites out there.
Second, what would a fair processing charge be? Certainly not thousands of dollars. Here is just one journal that manages to provide the same level of service for the princely sum of EUR 75 if you submit an MS Word manuscript: https://www.wind-energy-science.net/about/article_processing...
Third, in no way are a blog and a scientific journal equivalent.
Breaking their peculiar hold on research is taking decades. arXiv has existed for over 30 years, but physics journals still thrive.
Nobody wants to deal with the big pink elephant, so instead we argue about who's gonna pick up the turd it left in the living room.
It's not "free". We've already paid for the content in the journals through taxes. Most research is funded by government grants, carried out by scientists paid with public money.
The writing and the reviewing and most of the formatting is also done by scientists. The value that a journal provides on top of that is minimal. It's rent-seeking behaviour on content where the actual value has already been paid for.
They are already stopping: https://www.ukri.org/publications/ukri-open-access-policy
> the reason why is the same reason
And which reason is that?
People do it as a service to the community. And I don't necessarily ask to be payed for that, I was just answering the point about "I want everything to be free all the time and never pay for anything". We pay with our work to referee the papers. Sure there are extra costs to host the papers, typeset, but they should be nowhere near 2.5k GBP per paper.
At any rate, the last time I was employed as astrophysics faculty, my offer letter told me that I should “engage in scholarly activities”. I certainly interpreted that as an invitation to review the odd paper on the university's dime.