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I agree completely with Robert Merkel that the publishers are leeches. I was part of the academic community for a number of years, and have both been a contributer and reviewer. At this point in time, the publishers barely have to typeset anything, because of software like WORD and LaTeX. When I reviewed, the only thing I really recommended rejection for was bad, unclear writing. The research itself was honest, if not all that exciting. The peer-review process would effectively go on in an informal way even without the publishers, because in most fields, things are so specialized and sub-fields so small that everyone needs to be concerned about their reputations. If someone makes up research, it is either obvious to anyone familiar with the subject, or will be exposed soon enough. People's web pages will link to the research they find useful, if it is published on the web.
Sometimes the publishers don't even do any peer review. I was invited by Elsevier to submit a paper for publication because my abstract was accepted to a conference I was participating in. The real "peer-review" work (checking for relevance and rigor) was done by the conference committee who accepted the paper for the conference, not Elsevier. Elsevier's role in this case was simply to stick everything that the authors had written, and in most cases typeset themselves, into a "special volume" that they could charge for. Their attempt at "proof reading" was laughable. They sent me a list of corrections, six sentences which their editors had modified for grammar. The problem was, the editors clearly didn't speak English as a native language, as they inserted lots of articles that made no sense (e.g. "wavelengths of the interest"). So I had to spend my time submitting corrections to each of the sentences that their editors messed up, and return everything back to the way I had written it. So they contributed nothing, and made more work for me.
By the way one of my pet peeves is that when I search for terms in Google, abstract pages from the publishers pop up, though they don't have the papers available for free. I guess they use all the keywords from the paper (not just the words in the abstract) to draw you to their site. It really wastes my time. It would be nice if Google separated sites that make you pay to see the things you were searching for from the ones that take a more honest approach.
