Gavin_Galt

As a young scientist myself I figured I might chime in on this. While the subscription fees for journals are pretty high, in some cases it seems for no reason, the journals themselves are private organizations so they aren't getting directly funded by taxes. It is true that the editors, and those that are doing the peer reviews are generally academic scientists who are usually funded by way of grants, but the journals themselves do have some overhead.Additionally, while this may be seen as good or bad, for the time being a majority of the open access journals are crap. Rather than being funded by subscription fees, a lot of them charge people money to submit articles and are complete scams. The current system is super broken, and will come crumbling down eventually, but at least the peer review in the big journals is still pretty decent.