A recent article on The Guardian started (yet another) discussion on Open Access Journals. One party asks whether the results of publicly-funded research should only be available for a fee that helps the balance sheet of academic publisher. The other party wonders how do we avoid predatory publishers of Open Access journals charging $500 or more to publish a paper, and playing the “impact factor game“.

I don’t have an answer, I only have another question…All the work I do for academic publishers is voluntary. I review various dozens of articles every year for free, because I can list this activity in my CV. The same happens for editorial boards: academics do it for free. My question is: can’t we do (as academics) the whole publishing process as voluntary? In addition to non-paid reviewers and non-paid associated editors, why don’t we have non-paid associated sysadmins to manage a server?

There are various business models available for open access journals. What would be wrong with the following idea?

1. Authors are charged a small fee (say $20 for each accepted paper)
2. Assuming 4 issues per year, 10 articles in each issue would generate approx $800/year. This should be more than enough to maintain a couple of virtual machines (mirrored, for backups). I think ISSN numbers are free, but this needs to be investigated.
3. Open source software is available to manage submissions and reviews.
4. Electronic copies are made available for free, hard copies can be printed on-demand: editors prepare a PDF version of each issue and upload it to like lulu.com or a similar service, and libraries can print it from there if a hard copy is really needed.
5. New journals are created by a “group of experts”, similarly to the creation of a new conference / workshop.