I'm not a publisher but have worked at publishers in the past.
> All the journal does is provide a crappy web app
> to organize the process.
I'm guessing you're being facetious ;) but that's not true. It depends on the publisher but they may also edit the manuscript; find the right reviewers; have a full time editor make a decision based on the reviewer's feedback; typeset or convert it to machine readable format (authors submit in Word, but this'll often be converted to an industry standard XML format to allow interoperability between different databases - both abstract databases and publisher ones as journals change publishers frequently); ensure the content is properly stored (this is not the same as putting it up on S3 for 2 cents a month. It's the scholarly record and publishers generally take the responsibility of maintaining it seriously. Publishers pay a fee to put content into a darknet run by a consortia of libraries - if the publisher goes out of business the consortia makes all the content available for free. They also pay membership fees to industry organizations like CrossRef that allow them to deposit canonical metadata in a central database and mint DOIs) and discoverable (at the end of the day your paper will get much more attention when published in Science than it does your blog).
Are all of those things worth paying more than $99 an article for? It's debatable.
But can anybody with a Wordpress blog do what publishers can? No.
(Same sort of thing applies to trade. Look at self-published books. You can create great content for free and stick it in an EPUB but you'll rapidly find that you need to start shelling out to be included in the book databases bricks and mortar stores use, to have a cover designed, to get an ISBN, to start actually selling through Amazon or wherever... publishing isn't as trivial as it seems.)
> All the journal does is provide a crappy web app > to organize the process.
I'm guessing you're being facetious ;) but that's not true. It depends on the publisher but they may also edit the manuscript; find the right reviewers; have a full time editor make a decision based on the reviewer's feedback; typeset or convert it to machine readable format (authors submit in Word, but this'll often be converted to an industry standard XML format to allow interoperability between different databases - both abstract databases and publisher ones as journals change publishers frequently); ensure the content is properly stored (this is not the same as putting it up on S3 for 2 cents a month. It's the scholarly record and publishers generally take the responsibility of maintaining it seriously. Publishers pay a fee to put content into a darknet run by a consortia of libraries - if the publisher goes out of business the consortia makes all the content available for free. They also pay membership fees to industry organizations like CrossRef that allow them to deposit canonical metadata in a central database and mint DOIs) and discoverable (at the end of the day your paper will get much more attention when published in Science than it does your blog).
Are all of those things worth paying more than $99 an article for? It's debatable.
But can anybody with a Wordpress blog do what publishers can? No.
(Same sort of thing applies to trade. Look at self-published books. You can create great content for free and stick it in an EPUB but you'll rapidly find that you need to start shelling out to be included in the book databases bricks and mortar stores use, to have a cover designed, to get an ISBN, to start actually selling through Amazon or wherever... publishing isn't as trivial as it seems.)