Donald E. Knuth wrote quite a letter to the editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms about escalating fees:<p><a href="http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf</a><p>A major problem in replacing current scientific journals with something else is their use as reputation references for hiring and tenuring professors.<p>The Public Library of Science PLoS is an attempt at replacing the old journals. PLoS aims at keeping the price at cost, done by charging for publishing (once) and not for reading (unnumbered times) as is the current business model of the publishers. In short, we want the publishers to perish while keeping a reputation and least-abusable-as-possible system in place.