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Free/Open-Access Academic Journals Growing
An anonymous reader writes "Wired News reports on the growing number of free/open-access academic journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 1527 journals. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is launching three new open-access journals this year: PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens. The National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Public Access Policy is also part of the movement. The traditional academic journals aren't happy, saying that it's unethical to accept money for publishing. But the traditional journals face their own ethical dilemmas by accepting money from advertisers."
The money goes to pay the editors who choose which articles to send out for peer review, and who organize the review process. Those folks work very hard, and they won't work for free.
And you shouldn't think of it as paying to publish -- because, as you say, the Web means that you can now publish your own work for next to nothing. What you are paying for is the mark of approval: you're buying the right to claim that a journal editor and at least two or three of your peers have scrutinized your work and pronounced it correct, interesting, and new.
It's just like paying to take a standardized test, or to get a professional certification. Just as certified engineers are more likely to be hired, papers published in top journals are more likely to be read.
Every scientist has a circle of colleagues (some of whom may be mortal enemies!) whose papers (s)he wants to read right away, regardless of whether they have been approved by reviewers or not. That's what the preprint archives are for. But they don't replace the actual publishing process.