Publishers provide certain services (peer-review management, typesetting, brand badges, sometimes proof-reading or copy-editing, archiving, indexing) to the scholarly community. Those services are of greater and lesser value, provided at higher and lower levels of quality, and cost greater and lesser amounts. Of course, we in the scholarly community want high-value, high-quality low-cost services.

How things have always been Traditional scientific journals ask peer-reviewers to do two things: assess whether a manuscript is scientifically sound, and judge whether it’s sufficiently important to appear in the particular journal it’s been submitted to. So I could have sent my 2009 paper on Brachiosaurus to Nature , and the reviewers would (presumably) have said “this is good science, but not exciting or sexy enough for

Matt just wrote this, in an email exchange.  It struck a chord in me, and I thought it deserved a wider audience: Rats.