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@adamshostack The op-ed isn't just calling for no payment for publishing, it's calling for no journals at all, because if you just abolish publication charges, the journal owners will simply charge more for subscriptions, and she doesn't want that, either. Note these near the end: "At Arcadia Science, a biotechnology company, we publish everything immediately, openly. Real peer review happens in public, where any expert can contribute. Our work gets tested, challenged, and built on in real time" and "Alternatives exist: preprint servers, public peer review, data repositories. Redirect the millions from publishers to these systems."
I've long complained about today's peer review (see, e.g., https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/04336288.pdf, near the end). But I'm not clear on what the alternative is—major papers might get reviewed, but most won't, and readers have no way to judge the merits of reviews that are done. Are they honest or corrupt? Properly reviewing papers is *hard*, and there are so many papers written that it's impossible to keep up with all of the ones that aren't obviously of great significance if correct. You were at Usenix Security last month, which had 490 members on the program committee. (By contract, my first program committee, in 1984, was *4*, plus two co-chairs…) Even so, you often get unqualified reviewers. (I just got back reviews for a paper where all of the reviewers indicated "some familiarity" with the subject—none of them are experts, but they control if this paper will appear in that venue.)
In a sense, it's the same as the open source problem: you need many eyes, but they have to be competent and motivated. Today's peer review solves the motivation problem, but not always the competence problem. I won't even go into the problem of making sure that links survive when some volunteer gets tired of running an archive.
This is a hard problem and I don't pretend to know the answer. But let's be clear on that that op-ed is really saying.