Many of you will know that, whether per subscription fees or via open access models, there is a ridiculously absurd amount of money flowing to many big (or medium-size) publishers for getting our research outputs (i.e. papers, etc.) published in high-quality venues in the field.

The problem: Content and peer review (I think, the most important process stages from a scientific point of view) are delivered largely for free and voluntarily. In the STEM sciences, even proper camera-ready type setting (e.g. via LaTeX) is also very often done by the researchers themselves. Moreover, in fact, the downstream (i.e. after-acceptance) editorial process in traditional publishing companies is nowadays (for a number of reasons I don't want to elaborate on here) more likely to introduce faults through the various conversions and process stages that are involved. I'm speaking not only of my own experience but have even seen publications that have been corrected using post-prints, personal copies of authors, etc.

So, my question again: Can't we just extend well-known and widely-used archival platforms such as arXiv, biorXiv, etc. with a light-weight infrastructure to perform peer review (e.g. via an integration with EasyChair or the like and building up editorial teams) and transfer the whole peer review life-cycle from established publishers (with over the years questionably evolved business models) to such platforms? A tiny fraction of the (mostly tax payers') money currently flowing to such publishers would be invested in running the mentioned infrastructure. My naive assumption is that no relevant quality loss (if not even a gain in quality) is to be expected in certain fields of science after an appropriate ramp-up phase.

The only relevant issue, I can see for now, is the issue of lacking reputation or trustworthiness of such a platform as a publishing venue where, I suppose, it will be a matter of time for this issue to be overcome.

One of the reasons why I am asking is because I think that the mentioned amounts of money can be better invested in science for the public than it is now.

A question (totally obvious to me) that I've pondered over for a long time but was afraid to ask. Thanks for your thoughts on these, I apologise, probably too progressive and naive ideas.