Good points. The reason some of the nonpaywall journal options are not a huge game changer is that they have high article processing fees.

[Will add most of this comment to a section in the original post.]

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The reason some of the nonpaywall journal options are not a huge game changer, despite some being consistent, is that they have high article processing fees. Therefor they cannot defeat twigging.

(The real purpose. Science works less effectively when there is twigging. Where there is little reading. Rapid technical progress involves the community reading what comes out, more if more, less if less, not reading less and more narrowly, like a tree grows while the branches all remain the same thickness, if more comes out. That defeats the whole process. Adam Smith made science his first example of division of labor. Each does their part, and all communicate with all, and each knows more easily what any knows, doing only part of the work. Besides being specialized and doing it more accurately and faster. Specialization only works when it is not too narrow specialization. Else the Russell joke, that the specialist knows more and more about less and less and the generalist less and less about more and more becomes true and the game ends in defeat.)

The most significant and interesting achievement would be algorithms and automation such that neither a paywall nor publication or processing fees are necessary. Just peer reviewers and submissions and readers.

 
Costs and hassles and complexity are troublesome because they naturally reduce participation by everybody. Writers. Readers.

Yet this is a feedback system. It's fundamentally statistical.

When few readers, few reviewers, reviews of some sort are not publications themselves (exceptions being Mathematical Reviews and Behavioral and brain sciences), it's hard to get both speed. No speed, no interest, no numbers. Then no numbers, no interest, no speed.

One way to do things is to have peer review control rank and not worry about the rest. Less useful text should ideally move up and then way down. Papers that are more relevant and recent and good should consistently appear higher, with less time wasted. Reviews would be published and archived. Along with reviews of reviews. Revisions.

Some conjectures published before performing and publishing the correspond experimental work would be quite useful. Improve quality.

Papers could generally be published in pieces. Most people don't read long text anyway. Fortunately or unfortunately.

One issue in all fields is that most of those who do research like doing research more than writing about it and communicating it. But if they are more sloppy in their formal style, papers risk being rejected even if important results.

I find that people are quite a bit more excited about writing up what they are doing publishing sooner rather than later if it is Monday and they can submit the Introduction and Conclusion and References Thursday this week. Then most of the remainder Tuesday next week. And then diagrams Sunday the week after that.

Now that would be a game changer. It could change the statistics of publishing. And mode quality of the results. More eyes watching because new things could and would come out each day. If reviews are easy to post, far less hassle, and archived, and reviews of reviews have meaning, all the way down, and search tools, ... game changer. Today that just means reading arXiv, bioRxiv, basically.

How to deliver value by saving time for peer reviewers and readers. Which brings in more reviewers and readers. More eyes should see papers and check the arguments. Rashevsky said it decades ago, no royal road without reading and reviewing. Meanwhile twigging is the rain which has turned the road into mud.

And so the question becomes algorithms and developers. How to get an order of magnitude more readers and reviewers for manuscripts.

If you know developers who are interested in doing something, let's talk.

For example, this post took me a minute to type up. Had it taken me much more than that, more clicks involved, perhaps it would not been written. Reading a book at the same time. And so on.