If taxpayers pay $50k-$100k to scientists to write a paper, the least the government can do is spend another $5-50 to make it available for free perpetually.
In biology, a single PhD student typically costs on the order of $50k/year in terms of stipend and tuition support, and will typically be an author on fewer papers than the number of years they are in grad school, so I would guess the personnel costs alone are in the $100k range, with materials and reagents potentially being a similar amount.
The publication costs in PLoS journals are 20-50 times higher than your high end[1].
All that aside, I absolutely agree that the costs to society of not doing open access are much greater than the costs of doing it.
> The publication costs in PLoS journals are 20-50 times higher than your high end[1].
I would think that the cost of actually making it available (no vetting, just throwing it online) is probably much lower than the cost of publication[1]. Note that, from your link, the expenses in the price include "peer review, of journal production, and of online hosting and archiving".
[1] If it really does cost them even 50% of the prices they're charging to put a single paper online, then either most of it is being eaten up in bureaucracy or they're investing it and using the interest to pay for the hosting (which would make a lot of sense, actually).
It's not too clear to me why PLoS journals cost so much to publish in. In computer science, the open-access journals are typically free to publish in, supported by relatively modest funds from a hosting institution. For example, this is probably the top machine-learning journal, and I don't think it even has a budget or employees, just some donated bandwidth: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/
Where's the $3000-per-article difference coming from? PLoS journals do seem to have a more "magazine-like" production, while JMLR uses the typical CS/math approach of LaTeX typesetting. Is that the entire cost difference?
If taxpayers pay $50k-$100k to scientists to write a paper, the least the government can do is spend another $5-50 to make it available for free perpetually.