As I understand, journals earn money mainly by giving access to their issues or single articles copies. Eventually some journals ask authors to pay for the publications.
While universities pay money to journals to get access to issues and articles for all their staff and students.
Wouldn't it be better if universities paid money for each article a member of their staff asked to publish on a journal, letting the journals publish for free? In this scenary journals would get paid mainly for the review and editing process (which is right to be assigned to an impartial entity), and then leave the copies of their articles (with their brand on it) to spread over any platforms (and not copyrighted).
Universities would gain a lot by paying on a number of accepted publications basis, rather than for "availability" of research. The more their staff publishes, the better their rankings. So they could pay a bit more for the prestige they get in return.
I see a win-win situation. What am I not seeing in the bigger picture here?
Actually, you do see the big picture, unless I somehow misunderstood your question. What you are talking about now becomes an ever stronger trend, and e.g. many grant agencies require the research funded by them to be published as open access (NIH in the USA is perhaps the best known example but there are many more, see e.g. the second link below) and sometimes are even willing to cover the publication charges.
One caveat, however, is to avoid the journals which publish pretty much everything provided the author pays without substantial peer review (sometimes such journals are called predatory, see e.g. the third link below).
http://www.slideshare.net/healthsciences/green-versus-gold-open-access
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access
http://scholarlyoa.com
Thank you Artur for the good answer. Also the caveat you mentioned was something I didn't think of.
The costs to prepare a manuscript are enourmous. There are some profit but not that much, except for those that make a point of pubishing in journals with high impact factors. However, journal IF is irrelevant for authors scientific evalution, except when the evaluators are not adequaltly familiarized with the editing procesess.
It is my believe that in the future, authors should look into creating their own pages and learn how to make them available in the multiple search engines that already exist in the internet,
The main issue is how to guarantee a high-quality peer review process. If we as researchers start to suspect that it is possible to pay the journal to have a manuscript accepted, we will not trust the research as much. I think this is why there are very few highly ranked completely fee-funded open access journals around. However, it is getting more common to get the option to pay for open access of your manuscript, but that is normally done AFTER acceptance, so that the editors and reviewers don't know that you have chosen that option. Then, they can't be tempted to accept the manuscript just to get the income.
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