The challenge is the peer review system - not saying it can’t be done, but facilitating quality reviews is often costly.
There has, however, been a push to publish articles as “open access” which costs more for the author but makes it publicly available free of charge to read.
Overall the system is still a pretty big scam, but would be difficult to make 100% free.
There’s groups doing free peer review in a mutual aid sort of way. As I understand it, reviewers don’t really get paid anyway and the work is often dumped on students around the professor. Example of a group doing community peer review: https://archaeo.peercommunityin.org/PCIArchaeology/
States/academic institutions have to make it part of the job description of people. Get designated an editor of a journal? Your Uni understands and hands you an additional TA to lighten the load elsewhere and/or deal with the paperwork aspects.
The reviewing itself is already done pro bono anyways.
The challenge is the peer review system - not saying it can’t be done, but facilitating quality reviews is often costly.
There has, however, been a push to publish articles as “open access” which costs more for the author but makes it publicly available free of charge to read.
Overall the system is still a pretty big scam, but would be difficult to make 100% free.
What’s the cost? People aren’t paid for peer reviews, right? So, is it just difficult to arrange peer reviews?
There’s groups doing free peer review in a mutual aid sort of way. As I understand it, reviewers don’t really get paid anyway and the work is often dumped on students around the professor. Example of a group doing community peer review: https://archaeo.peercommunityin.org/PCIArchaeology/
States/academic institutions have to make it part of the job description of people. Get designated an editor of a journal? Your Uni understands and hands you an additional TA to lighten the load elsewhere and/or deal with the paperwork aspects.
The reviewing itself is already done pro bono anyways.