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CS academics have been slowly taking control of more of our own journals. It somewhat helps that there is already relatively little editing/layout work done on the journal's side, because computer scientists like to produce publication-ready PDFs straight out of LaTeX, and a journal is more or less just a concatenation of those. In some other fields it's more common to send a draft-formatted manuscript, which the journal staff will format into professional-looking magazine style; that requires more of a "real" staff, which then means you need a budget and source of funds and such. This is one reason some open-access publications in other areas are turning to charging the authors to fund the operations (although reputable journals will waive the fee for authors who don't have a source of funds such as a grant to cover the fee, so it's not fully "pay to play").

In AI, two of the top journals are now open-access and run on a shoestring budget by academics, so also don't have any publication charges: http://jmlr.org http://jair.org

Here was the 2001 letter that kicked off JMLR: http://jmlr.org/statement.html



Lots of fields primarily use LaTeX to typeset papers, e.g. physics and computational biology. Typesetting and hosting a PDF never justifies a $1500 publishing fee given that reviewers, editors and of course authors are all working for free. Hence even the good-guy (non-profit) publisher PLOS took about 20% excess revenue in 2012, primarily by charging $1300 odd dollars for publication in PLOS ONE.

Why do we even need the dated journal model? Push everything to a central arXiv, biorXiv like repo (funded as they are by small donations from institutions). Couple this with open post-publication peer review and endorsements. Millions of tax dollars saved around the world, research open to everyone.

The counter argument is the rubber stamp that accompanies a prestigious journal (and filtering the crazies) but if the repo was accompanied with a suitable array of article-level metrics and thorough categorisation the good science can continue to filter to the top, much like how HN and reddit work.




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