[TheAmazingIdiot]

A mail server and website combination is cheap to build. Your only cost is bandwidth.

The only real cost is bandwidth. That's when you have the schools host these cheap servers. "instead of 15 million USD, we want to colo. Deal?"

And to completely trounce your idea, publishing is easy for journals. It's called "load page and press print". There's hardly any reason to print tomes that can easily loaded ip on a web page as needed. And if you need a bound book, go to lulu or other JIT publisher.

[cmsmith]

Publishing is not referring to printing the physical journals (no one is arguing that those should be free).

Publishing refers to the work done by editors, copyeditors, typesetters, etc. Without those paid employees the quality of journals would drop significantly.

[TheAmazingIdiot]

You mean all the work the grad students do when they write the content.... And all the work other grad students do when they typeset it? Sure. Apologist.