> What value does the publisher's work add to the work the author generated?

- organizing peer review - spell-checking and fixing layout problems - making sure that the paper stays available for a long time - handling complaints and retracting fraudulent papers - providing a single point of contact for people who would like to reuse published material (e.g., using illustrations in a textbook).

Sure, many publishers don't do a very good job for the money they are taking. Sure, there might be better approaches for disseminating knowledge than the current one. However, in the world as it is now, publishers can and do provide some value.

- At least in computer science, it's generally professors who organise the peer review (the Program Commitee)

- I've heard from several collegues that the editor introduced spelling mistakes. Sure, overall they might get some errors out, but a spellcheck is not needed.

- Well yes. But there is no need for that to be expensive.

- Do we need them for this? If there really is fraud, previous cases show it's their university that starts an investigation. I'm not sure if the effect of retracting a paper is that significant..

- If all papers were public in the first place, there is no need to contact someone if it's okay to reuse material.

Anyway publishers might provide some value, but not enough to demand we pay for every single paper, or pay costly subscriptions. They need to die already or adept.

I agree with your general perspective. (I have publicly vowed to never act as a reviewer for Elsevier, for example.)

However, ignoring the traditional role of publishers does not help our case. Regarding your individual points:

- Peer review for CS conferences is usually organized by volunteers, yes. However, this is not true for other, journal-focused disciplines, where there are paid assistants

- One might argue that spelling/layout checks are not really necessary. I personally appreciate them. In any case, these _are_ services that publishers usually offer.

- I was not trying to argue that the typical publisher does a good or cheap job. What I wanted to say is that publishers can and do add value.

- Universities usually try to handle scientific fraud discretely (for PR, HR, and legal reasons). They are usually not interested in disseminating bad news widely.

- Sure, if we could retroactively bring all previously published works into the public domain, things would be much easier. However, in the copyright system we live in right now, publishers provide a useful service by taking care of author's rights and facilitating reuse.

- Journals are also often volunteer based, at least in the sciences.

- Publishers really don't do much for spelling/layout. They give you a format to fit in, and then put up an automated system for you to check against.

- Fraud is handled by the community (See: Retraction Watch) much more effectively than by journals.

I was once tangentially involved in the preparation of a journal. All those things you listed were done for free by professors and grad students.

About fifteen years ago I was working on a venture to make an open-content journal publishing system. It didn't pan out for various reasons, but the general argument we were making this. Here are various services, and who (or what) handles them:

- Peer review and top-level decision-making. This is handled entirely by the editorial board.

- Typesetting. We have a free system for this: it's called LaTeX.

- Copy-editing and typeset-checking. This is handled by the publisher.

- Publishing and archiving. This is handled by the publisher.

- Famous Name. This is controlled by the publisher and is pure rent-seeking.

It used to be that the publisher handled much more than this. But with a decent online publishing, workflow, and archiving system, and with a near-zero cost in publishing and archiving online nowadays, essentially the only useful service the publisher provides is copy-editing. That is very minor.

If a free online business model can figure out how to fund copy-editing and automatic standards enforcement (for example, people make awful bibtex entries, including Springer's auto-generation system), and a university institution willing to host the journal's archives, the entire utility of a publisher disappears.

The big problem is not computer science, I think, which is rapidly moving to an online model. The big problem is that non-CS fields have no typesetting facility -- they submit articles in Word, which Elsevier/Springer then hands off to typesetters in India, who typically reset the whole thing, including bibtex entries, in LaTeX for publication. These entire fields are still reliant on copy editors and typesetters, and thus are stuck with rent-seeking.

I think the right approach is for a journal to require that authors have their papers certified by one of several "copy-editing / typesetting certification agencies" (a concept I made up). It's up to the authors to pay for that. This would almost completely eliminate the value of a publisher, and as there are multiple certification agencies vying, the cost would drop to a reasonable amount.

Thinking in terms of for-profit sounds like the wrong way to do it. You need to setup a 503c Foundation, much like the WMF.

Edit: it occurs to me that the Wikimedia Foundation is actually in the best position to do this! If you tried this before and still have the old infrastructure or business plan, have you considered approaching the WMF Board?

By "venture" I don't mean for-profit: absolutely nothing we were building was going to be for-profit. It'd be all open content.

I abandoned the project well before the infrastructure was ready for prime time: the tenure clock beckoned.

I totally understand :-)

What do you think of Wikiversity's Journal of Medicine? It's a decent stab at a reputable open journal:

http://www.wijoumed.org/

It looks interesting but a bit spooky. A real editorial board would have dozens of action editors. They only require a single review, and it's not entirely clear what the process is. They also permit rubriq, which has ill-defined measures for review quality and payment, kind of amazing given that it's wading into an area of very problematic ethics.

This doesn't feel like a major player yet, but what do I know, I'm not in medicine. In my field, reputable open journals would be things like PLOS One, JMLR, and JAIR.

> making sure that the paper stays available for a long time

It's something that could actually be handled much better (and cheaper) by an inter-university p2p network (like BitTorrent). Such a network would double as an on-site, offline-available library of papers.

Sure, there are other ways. Arxiv is certainly an option. However, someone still needs to develop and organize this (and pay for that). There is no free lunch - either you are paying a publisher for this service, or a university library to do the same.

(Of course, one might argue that other entities might be able to do the same thing cheaper - but this was not the topic of my argument)

(Actually, there already is some sort of "inter-university p2p network": http://www.lockss.org/ )

Presumably the value in a journal publisher is: a) it's name, being accepted to certain journals is an indicator of quality b) to readers who are guaranteed published works have been peer reviewed

That being said I'm not a massive fan and I believe there is probably a model whereby you can get these value-adds without the closed down subscription system. Publicly funded research should be publicly available.

Sorry but its name!