Publishing, editing and the prestige assigned to certain journals can't me done completely for free. But it sure has gotten a lot more cheap and convenient to read papers on a computer via arxiv or even a PDF than in a physical printed journal. I do look forward when we have a well run open source SCIence HUB.
Apparently PubMed Central, which has a very large repository of articles (millions), costs about US$ 3 million per year to provide free-to-user access. They only provide what publishers allow, however.
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Publishing, editing and the prestige assigned to certain journals can't me done completely for free. But it sure has gotten a lot more cheap and convenient to read papers on a computer via arxiv or even a PDF than in a physical printed journal. I do look forward when we have a well run open source SCIence HUB.
Governments already fund so much science, funding a few free journals doesn't seem like much of a stretch.
Not much different to Australia funding Trove.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/
Apparently PubMed Central, which has a very large repository of articles (millions), costs about US$ 3 million per year to provide free-to-user access. They only provide what publishers allow, however.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/faq/