Early on when I was publishing for the first time, I published in an online open access journal entitled The Journal of Memetics. Being naif, I didn't think it mattered. I had an idea I wanted to get out, and that was the place where the discussion was going on. What I didn't realise was that this was new in the academic world of publishing.
The Leiter Reports has an interesting discussion on the need for expensive for-profit journals, with most commenters to the thread agreeing that the time for these publications is ending. I am skeptical that they will, and here are some reasons:
First of all, one of the main problems with electronic open access publications is that they are ephemeral. The site may or may not continue, at the whim of the institution and the continued involvement of the people who set it up. Links will change, and there needs to be a persistent repository that will last as long as a printed copy.
Second, open access journals often require the academics to pay a fee for being open access. This tends to be when the journal is published by a commercial publisher, but there are costs involved in the administration of the journal itself, and the site at which they exist.
Third, journals are indeed a profit maker for the publisher, but this is not necessarily money grubbing on their behalf. Most journals actually fund the publication of otherwise commercially inviable monographs. In 1991 I did a tour of the American-based publishing houses and every one of them told me that they use the journal profits, which they got from economies of scale, to fund monograph and technical publications. Without the journals, monographs will become extinct.
Since monographs are the lifeblood of academic discourse, the impact of losing them will change forever the way academic discourse is carried on. University of Chicago Press, for instance, publishes books that have print runs of fewer than a few thousand. To recoup the costs entirely through the sale price will send the cost per book up to many hundreds of dollars. This cost will find its way back to the users of these monographs, the academics working in a specific field, and is going to eat into their research funding in a major way.
I don't think that people have thought through the impact of ephemeral free journals on the academic world. If monographs are "published" without the editorial and reviewer oversight that a publisher brings to the enterprise, the quality will decline, and their usefulness will also decline. The outcome could be catastrophic to academic quality.
How to get around this? One way might be for academic associations to require their members to act as reviewers for monographs and journals they administer themselves, but again the cost will find its way into the academic membership fees of each association. Or commercial publishers might use "on demand" publishing of electronic documents, so that libraries can buy copies that will last, but demand publishing has some problems, not least in the quality of the print and the binding. So costs will find their way back to the libraries at any rate when they have to rebind these documents, and they may not last more than a few decades. This might not matter in science, but in my (historical) discipline it will be catastrophic. The loss of works will change the way we can do our work.
Another option might be for governments to fund perpetual repositories of electronic documents the way the DOI site does for links now. But then this is sensitive to political interference - if there is a budget cutback, the site may be curtailed in the future. Alternatively, journal publishers, whether commercial or not, might contract archive companies to archive these documents, the way that JSTOR does, but again there is a subscription cost. And the libraries or the institutions that use it are going to have to pay.
The tradeoffs of ease of research might make it attractive to take these paths, but at some point the costs are going to end up the same as the printed versions. What is going to happen? I can't say, but whatever, free publication is a myth.
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You know, a lot of monographs and journals aren't exactly high-quality print either.
The "print versus digital" question is separate from the "peer-review versus editorial-review versus no-review" question is separate from "subscription pays versus submitter pays" question.
You can have any combination of those three questions, including the - I think inevitable - end result of any combination excluding print. A definite digital edition is just as stable as a print one, content wise, or even more (you can even publish a "watermark", a cryptographic checksum, so anybody can ensure their copy is correct, something you can not do with multiple editions and print runs of a paper version, notorious for introducing edits and print errors).
If you want it on paper, print it out - but in the long run, it's most likely safer as a multitude of digital copies spread out over the world than a few hundred printed artifacts. How many of those monographs do you think will still be extant say a hundred years from now? How many small-print monographs from the end of the nineteenth century do you think are already gone? Print is _not_ stable.
Surprisingly few.. I sometimes have to search a bunch of libraries to find them, but they are often available somewhere, even if only on microfiche. Also, I often find them on ABEBooks for sale, so they aren't so hard to find. But in a century, electronic copies may have gone to the big bitbucket in the sky, along with the 1/2" tape on which they are archived...
I really like having access to past issues of Science on JSTOR, but when I sit down (on the can, say) to read through an issue it isn't very convenient to do it using a computer.
RE: Long Term Digital Storage
This is certainly possible, but thought has to be given to changing technologies, storage mediums, and the lifetime of the medium. Vellum documents going back centuries can still be quite readable, but I had a professor call me on Friday asking what he could do to read his 5.25 inch floppy disks. Unfortunately, we had gotten rid of the last of those over 5 years ago after sending out a notice.
If you store a digital copy, you are committed to making sure that the copy is non-degraded and moved to a different medium every 5 years or so as storage media becomes obsolete.
Even if that old 20 meg backup tape is still perfectly readable and pristine, what happens where there's no tape deck that can read it?
So you stored your files in xyzwrite format or nota bene format 15 years ago. What will read them correctly today? PDF? Maybe, but there's no rule that says that Adobe is going to be around in 5 years, let alone 15 or 20.
There are some great advantages to digital storage, but some big disadvantages too.
Which is why you need a laptop. Or would that be a craptop?
I managed a department that generated about 20Gb of edited files every year. We stored them in an open source format (e.g., PDF or RTF) wherever possible, unless they were in something broadly used like Illustrator (which is a superset of PDF) or PhotoShop (which is almost an open source format anyway). We kept CDs, DVDs, tape backups, server archives, and local copies of everything...
The changing technologies and storage argument may have valid 20 years ago, but it's not really an issue anymore. Storage (especially for something as simple as text) is cheap.
Sure it may take a bit of effort to make sure it's all keep current, but it's really not anything different than the maintenance you have to put into storing paper-based mediums. If you're afraid of PDF going obsolete just make an ascii text version of it.
Plus the "at your fingertips" ease of use and the global search capabilities make digital far superior.
Official PDF monographs are completely possible and can easily be given quality editorial review. The editorial review may cost something, but it'll be cheap next to having to print it.
Sure the shift away from print may be awkward but the benefits outway the hurdles. And while it won't be free the costs should be cheaper (or else you're doing something wrong).
The next shift is more interesting: machine readable journals