I'm only familiar with math publishing, but I've never heard of a math journal that did anything other than provide a web form for the editor to request a review (and similarly, for the reviewer to submit with).
Typesetting is usually done (correctly) by latex, and then possibly screwed up by some human the publisher outsourced to. Automated typesetting is a solved problem, and there is no need for humans.
As for your cost of $99/article, the Arxiv costs $400k/year (though admittedly, Donald Knuth does the typesetting).
As for your "darknet", are you really going to claim this darknet is more reliable than mirroring articles to 3-4 amazon regions plus rackspace files? I'm sure the darknet costs at least 10x as much, but that isn't the issue. Similarly, paying membership fees to the other big publishers to keep little guys out of the market is again not the issue.
If it weren't for reputation effects and agency costs (i.e., if the market were competitive), this process would cost well under $99/article. The only reason the publishers haven't already died is because tenure committees want to see Journal of Computational Physics rather than the Upstart Computational Physics Journal.
Typesetting is usually done (correctly) by latex, and then possibly screwed up by some human the publisher outsourced to. Automated typesetting is a solved problem, and there is no need for humans.
As for your cost of $99/article, the Arxiv costs $400k/year (though admittedly, Donald Knuth does the typesetting).
As for your "darknet", are you really going to claim this darknet is more reliable than mirroring articles to 3-4 amazon regions plus rackspace files? I'm sure the darknet costs at least 10x as much, but that isn't the issue. Similarly, paying membership fees to the other big publishers to keep little guys out of the market is again not the issue.
If it weren't for reputation effects and agency costs (i.e., if the market were competitive), this process would cost well under $99/article. The only reason the publishers haven't already died is because tenure committees want to see Journal of Computational Physics rather than the Upstart Computational Physics Journal.