Part of the issue here is that you likely think that $2850 is too much money. I’d tend to agree with you. At least part of the reason for this is likely that the supply of people wishing to publish in open access journals is fairly small compared to larger journals. As the number of researchers choose to publish in open access journals increases, I’d expect that price to drop dramatically. Also, since PLoS is a lesser-known journal that started online, it’s unlikely that their print subscriptions are very profitable. Many people and institutions want print copies of journals available, and this would be another form of revenue that would allow the publisher to decrease the publication fee.

You also compare this model to communism. As I pointed out above, the publisher should definitely still charge for a print copy of the publication. This is a tangible good, and it should prove to be a profitable part of their business model. Electronic publication should cost essentially nothing if done right. The information essentially disseminates itself. Should customers pay for that? No. You just have to think like a dandelion.

I highly doubt that the quality of research would be destroyed or even lessened under this system. In fact, my guess is that it would improve over the next few years. In the online age, it’s really a poor business model to lock your content up so that only certain people can see it. Providing any barriers to access will significantly reduce its spread. Even requiring a sign-up form will prevent a significant percentage of people from seeing it. Your best bet is just to put it out there and let it fly. As a potential customer, seeing your high quality work consistently come up in my quest for information might promote me to purchase a print subscription to your journal so that I can share it with others in our lab. Not to mention that extensive reading online is uncomfortable and it’s difficult to make notes. Maybe I don’t want to just print out the PDFs of the one or two articles I know about. Maybe I’d like to see what others are doing that’s a little bit further from my area of expertise and have it delivered in a nice, neat package. Dissemination breeds interest.

The easier it is for someone interested in your research to get at it, the more useful it will be. It will promote better cooperation between the researchers themselves, and it will help bring new faces into the arena. Currently most high school students, those at small colleges, and those trying to access information from off-campus (to name a few) are denied access. There are people out there who are interested in science that will never achieve their full potential because they couldn’t get to an interesting article. That’s wrong. And if the government is footing the bill, they should be fighting against that by promoting open access.

The open access journals are not going to address the issues you point out. You are proposing to replace “some smaller institutions do not enjoy the luxury of being able to subscribe to anything” with “some smaller institutions do not enjoy the luxury of being able to publish anything”. In other words, you’re proposing to reduce the supply of science.

Moreover, on the market, the *customer* is supposed to pay not the producer. You’re proposing having everybody pay for the right to be published, in order for customers to get the product for free. This sounds like communism for the publishing industry and I guess it would fail (i.e. destroy the quality of published research) for the same reasons that communism failed.