I think publishers provide the valuable services like proofreading, aid the peer-review process and content filtering. They SUCK at distribution though and should not be in the distribution business.<p>Now who is good at distribution? arXiv is.
Their costs are less than 7$ per publication, they are seriously lean and efficient.<p>&#60;quote&#62;
How much does arXiv cost to operate?
The annual budget for arXiv is $400,000. With over 60,000 new submissions per year one may think of this as an effective cost of &#60;$7 per submission. Alternatively, with over 30,000,000 full-text downloads per year this is an effective cost of &#60;1.4 cents per download. We believe that arXiv is an extremely cost-effective service.
&#60;/quote&#62; <a href="http://arxiv.org/help/support/faq" rel="nofollow">http://arxiv.org/help/support/faq</a><p>Now the question is how to keep the useful aspects of publishing and not have to pay for them. An army secretaries, a bunch of typesetting gurus and some method for peer-review... tall order i know.