> the difficulty of financing peer-reviewed publishing if subscriptions are free.
Nope. Peer reviewing is performed largely for free; in the few cases where the reviewer is paid, their fee is paltry. This is even more ridiculous when you consider that it often costs scientists hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to even submit their article to the journal in the first place. You might say, "Well, what about editing? That must be expensive, right?" Wrong. Scientific journals do not edit the content of articles they publish. I've met many professors who learned that the hard way when they encountered typos in their own published journal articles. The whole system is a corrupt, monopolistic joke, and the sooner that everyone who works at Elsevier/JSTOR/wherever is out of a job, the better.
Nope. Peer reviewing is performed largely for free; in the few cases where the reviewer is paid, their fee is paltry. This is even more ridiculous when you consider that it often costs scientists hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to even submit their article to the journal in the first place. You might say, "Well, what about editing? That must be expensive, right?" Wrong. Scientific journals do not edit the content of articles they publish. I've met many professors who learned that the hard way when they encountered typos in their own published journal articles. The whole system is a corrupt, monopolistic joke, and the sooner that everyone who works at Elsevier/JSTOR/wherever is out of a job, the better.