edit: Just to give an idea of the costs> http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/scholarlycommunication/oa_fees.h...
The reality is that publishers make all their money from site licenses. Harvard, e.g., will spend $15 million a year on subscriptions to various publishers like Elsevier, in return for access to all the new papers, and the back catalog.
Most papers that are downloaded, around 80%, are from the back catalog anyway, meaning that universities are incredibly price insensitive with respect to site license subscriptions. Journals could offer the new papers for free, and still universities would pay for the site license subscription.
This is what has happened with the arxiv: most new papers in theoretical physics are on there for free, and yet physics departments still subscribe to the theoretical physics journals. Why is that? It's because the departments need access to papers in the back catalog, which are not on the arxiv.
The upshot of this is that site license revenue wouldn't be affected by requiring open access on research 6 months after publication (or even 3 months, or 0 months, in my view). There is enough price insensitivity in the system for existing revenues to be unaffected by a change like this.
The reason the journal industry hates legislation like this, despite it not posing an economic danger to them, is that they are worried about the general trend of the government getting involved in changing the scientific publishing industry.
The journal industry would like to freeze their business model in the form that it was in during the pre-internet days. They believe that it's in their interest to fight every piece of pro-change legislation that the government suggests, in order to slow down the rate of change.
The high prices you linked too aren't an impediment, they are THE REASON TO DO IT.
Also, when it comes to tax payer funded research, it's already, you know, funded.
The only real cost is bandwidth. That's when you have the schools host these cheap servers. "instead of 15 million USD, we want to colo. Deal?"
And to completely trounce your idea, publishing is easy for journals. It's called "load page and press print". There's hardly any reason to print tomes that can easily loaded ip on a web page as needed. And if you need a bound book, go to lulu or other JIT publisher.
Publishing refers to the work done by editors, copyeditors, typesetters, etc. Without those paid employees the quality of journals would drop significantly.
I'm sorry, cmsmith.
I would argue that value would be gained by sacking these people (and organizations).
Most of the money they (and other journals) uses is dependent on excessive licensing fees charged to universities. The universities turn around and add that to each person's tuition.
And all the work the journal publishes WAS owned by the students of the very university, until the journal demands transfer of copyright to the journal... So they can sell them back work at 1000X the profit.
By definition, they are parasites. What we need is a good anti-parasitic medicine.
Basically.. the question is, is it possible for an open access journal to be run for orders of magnitude less money than every existing open access journal currently in existence? You seem to think the answer is "definitely yes", but you haven't explained why. What is your insight that has been missed by so many others?
Furthermore, thinking of finances of open access publishers, even PLoS has its issues at its current prices http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080702/full/454011a.html
Assuming that won't happen, then if all publications were open access, there would be a lot more grant money that would have to be spent on publishing fees rather than research. That was the point the guy we originally replied to was making http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5052476 so citing PLoS as an example isn't really meaningful. It's just an example of precisely the issue he was raising, not a rebuttal.