Actually, not so much in this case. Open-access publishing is cheaper for researchers as well as readers -- much, much cheaper. The problem is only getting from here to there. There is no question than the grass really is greener on the other side, for everyone except the middle-men currently growing fat on the Proprietary Academic Publishing Tax.

I'm not convinced they perform no useful function. At the least, they curate the collection. Who will do that? For free? Reliably?

Its disingenuous to say "Lets have X for free" without examining the economics. Why not cars for free? Free movies! I'd like that, Netflix is expensive.

Almost all of the work is done by academics.

The reviewers are unpaid academics.

The editors are academics, and paid very, very little.

Essentially, all the journals do is print them (which is pointless these days) and maintain the website (which is something that could easily be done by libraries).

In fact, most universities provide open access repositories for all of the papers of their academics, so the journal websites could be reduced to a submission site, and links to the finalised papers with very little injection of money.

Joe, no-one is suggesting curation, hosting, indexing and the like should be done for free. (At least, I a not!) We are suggesting that the result of this work should be available to all -- including, crucially, the researchers who did the work and the citizens whose taxes funded it. Increasingly, we are seeing the author-pays model work well, with publication fees coming out of project grants.

That seems like a conflict of interest for the publisher. For every article filtered out, they lose money?

Or pay to submit and risk not being accepted anyway? Kind of a 'poll tax', where you have to have money to be heard. In principle its shakey either way, though if the fees were low enough...

Cambridge (where the blog is hosted) has been a staunch defender of sane academic freedom of speech for hundreds of years.

I say "sane" because Cambridge groks individual responsibility, and generally stays out of the way.

Why should researchers be forced to publish in closed-access journals? There are many of us that feel the same, and would publish openly if we could.

Free cars and free movies are not access to information though.

You're right. Making arguments like this are a way to shortcut a complex system of possible actions. It's like the old story about a computer's long boot time costing lives.

If only there were some mechanism we could use to assign value to all possible actions, content, and products. Some way of determining how much life/value each action would create and then pursuing the actions that provide the most efficient value. Seems too complex of a search space for a single authority though, and people would disagree on how many lives are saved/value.

Perhaps a crowd sourced method where everyone individually voted what was most important to them, and those votes assigned value. To avoid spam we could make people provide things of value themselves in order to benefit from the value created by others. So the higher the assigned value, the more people are trying to provide it.

(TL;DR)free market.

Congratulations - you've created a reduction from a somewhat-tractable problem to a much harder one.

The point was that we already have solved the problem of "where do we spend our time given that all options have costs"

If this were true ("solved"), it would be the prime argument for a centrally planned economy. 'Free market' isn't a solution, but a heuristic that produces a non-horrible moral outcome.

One of the reasons we discuss things symbolically is to hopefully take advantage of the structure of the problem to generate a better outcome. Your reduction of journal-access to free-market is about as useful as a reduction from addition to 3SAT.