My basic position is that if the government pays for the research, access to it should be free to everyone. I am not involved enough with academia to have a firm idea about what is needed to make that work, but as a first step one could take the money universities and libraries pay to get subscriptions to various journals and use it to fund peer review and such directly.
How do you think peer review is funded now? It is funded by those subscriptions and Open Access fees. The average OA fee that an author pays is north of $3,000/paper now. Publishers have been working with universities to create read and publish deals that give institutions a set number of "free" OA submissions per year and then combines that with subscriptions for the non-OA content. Of course, like everything OA, the wealthy nations, senior authors with hefty grants, and institutions benefit. Why? Because they can afford to fund OA.
Who cannot afford it? Young researchers with limited grants and funding and less funded institutions and nations. Publishers try to allow free OA submissions from developing countries but the budget for such waivers is highly limited. Additionally, OA has led to serious drains for research societies who relied on their journals for funding. Society publications are being absorbed by publishers because they can no longer compete on volume. Publishers have turned around and reduced the funding they give to societies, forcing them to adopt lower standards for peer review, copyediting, and channeling their content into agreements that cede more control to large publishers.
Finally, this has led to the rise of large content aggregator platforms controlled by an increasingly smaller number of publishers. Institutions have been shedding journal subscriptions in favor of buying subscriptions access to the large platforms. The large platforms demand increases in content to justify continued price hikes. This has further eroded the journal and is killing independent societies and journals, thus concentrating more power into fewer massive publishers.
Publishers, in turn, are merging and buying each other and any groups that offer competition to their prices and services. This is why we are getting massive offshoring and the move into more AI tools.
OA is a nice concept, but the proponents have no way to pay for it outside massive grants from organizations like the Gates Foundation, Welcome Trust, and governments. Government funding for science is iffy now and they are very stingy with any money to publish. The average research grants generates 10-15 papers. This means that authors are paying 35k+ to publish and if they have grants from the government or places like Gates, then they are mandates to only publish OA.
It is a mess. Governments fund research. The average person is not going to understand it. People should pay for the value added peer review, production, marketing, hosting and dissemination. That is work that was not funded. Let the un-peer-reviewed, raw papers be free with disclaimers on them that they have
not been been peer reviewed.
By the way, university and library budgets have been under assault for 20 years. They cannot afford to run peer review. They can barely afford to maintain access to content platforms. They have no money to purchase the average 50-75k/year submission system, staff to run peer review (100-300k), honoraria to pay editors (50-200k), production (100-200k), hosting platforms (100k), marketing to increase dissemination (200k). The average journal can cost 500k per year, usually more, to operate and maintain.
