I know how the system works, I&#x27;m an academic myself.<p>If you really think that no-one employed by journals is actually doing any work, I&#x27;m not sure what to say. The reality is that editing and publishing are time consuming, and that if this work is not being doing by paid employees of journals, it&#x27;s going to have to be done by someone else.<p>Paper selection is not really the issue. That is largely done by (unpaid) reviewers in any case. It&#x27;s everything else that goes into running a journal that&#x27;s potentially going to give rise to problems.<p>Again, I&#x27;m not saying that it&#x27;s impossible for a group of academics to get together and run a journal entirely by themselves. I think it&#x27;s less clear whether this model can scale to replacing all current traditional journals. It&#x27;s very easy to confuse work that&#x27;s easy with work that&#x27;s quick. Yes, it&#x27;s easy to set up a website with a few PDFs on it, and it&#x27;s easy to forward papers to reviewers, and it&#x27;s easy to come up with a LaTeX stylesheet for papers, etc. etc. But maintaining all of that stuff and keeping it running smoothly eats up a lot of time, even though there&#x27;s nothing fundamentally difficult about it.