Funding, or a startup enterprise, is certainly needed to administer the peer review process. I'm willing to bet it would be less than $10 per paper in universal use. No money is needed to pay reviewers. In fact the savings would be so great, their could be a courtesy payment. The ruinous censorship and false ownership of the publishers should be broken.
(1) Someone else in this context refers to anyone other than the author-researcher. The point I am attempting to make is that researchers, as long as they are on an academic grant and salary, and with the prospects of generating millions of dollars of private property, have no incentive to change the system.
(2) It is clear that in electronics, biochemistry, and even in my little field, laser physics, the commercial applications overwhelm traditional pure research in degree of economic input, persons employed, turnover, etc. This is true in all hard sciences and life sciences. If it is not true in other fields, do they outweigh the scientific engineering fields? I think not.
It's really not that insane. Two garbage egg mcmuffins these days run for $9.50ish which probably costs about 10 cents to make. I'll take the quality of chipotle for $7-10 anyday over the insanely overpriced bullshit the others are pumping out.
Optical physicists and chemists need a laser with a knob on it to tune the laser to an exact desired color. In the 70s and 80s, the preferred method was the use of liquid dyes as the laser medium, typically dissolved in alcohol. The dye was pumped at high speed through quartz cells, and was gotten to lase by striking it with a fixed wavelength green or ultraviolet laser. Now the best practice was to use Teflon tubing. It cleans up better, and that’s important because when changing colors, the new dye’s wavelength might be absorbed by the previous dye residue, if any. Man, the triboelectric shock you can get from high speed flow of alcohol through Teflon! The Livermore Lab was worried about this during the laser isotope separation program, as a fire hazard. The problem is solved by installing stainless steel ground wires in the Teflon tubes.