Where is the tipping point?

What if universities stopped buying academic journals, and put the money towards hiring editors who helped their faculty publish their scholarship in their own free, open-source journals?

I don’t know how much labour goes into running a prestigious journal, but let’s say all the universities that really need those specialised mathematics journals sat down and discussed what kind of editors they would need in order to create their own journals. Then they just stopped buying them, and spent the money paying for editors and online publishing. Since there’s no need to buy anything, a whole layer of administration is gone. The costs to paper and distribution is gone. There’s no need to control access, as all access would be free. There are of course a few snags here. Universities would like to promote their own scholars. This could be remedied for instance by making certain that the reviewers are from different universities, and by putting in a board of editors from related journals run by other universities. Working out these details in order to make sure there’s not even more playing of the reviewing process with this system than with the old one would take a while, but it would be worth it. The whole process needs to be shook up a bit anyway.  —Torill Elvira Mortensen