Re:Emergent Solution (Score 1)

Yes, I am in the same boat. My institution also does the huge pile of money for small gains.

I still maintain that by charging a reasonable fee per paper, the processing centers and the servers can get paid for (they will have to get paid for somehow.)

Let the market reward and punish the journals. A journal that charges less than its competitor for the same quality research will get more marketshare of readers, thus a higher citation index, thus more authors, and more readers of those authors. A journal that charges a lot will lose.

Perhaps the way is to let people download one or two articles for free? (You could learn how to use the links, and the occasional user would be able to download that one article from a journal that they need.) After this, you would have to pay.

Compared to the way electronic journals are bundled today, the iTunes model makes some sense. I put $50 on account at publishing house X and can download a paper for $2 each. 25 papers from what ever journals they publish.

Lastly, we come to the abstract. We can now read them online at no cost. Why not expand the format to include more of the results/discussion? If you need the paper for methods or bibliography, you buy it.