> Why should we accept publishers to decide on what this limit should be? Currently it can be as high as $5000. For hosting a PDF. This is a total waste of (mostly public) money.

I'm not sure there's a good way of limiting how much companies are allowed to charge for a service.

What the funding bodies can do, however, is limit the amount of money in a grant that can be spent on publishing costs. That's far easier.

> No because as long as we permit to those publishers to exists and exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title, their is a big inertia that incentivize researchers to publish with the publishers that hold the prestigious journal.

There is a big inertia, but currently the system makes big journals just as financially attractive as small journals or free places to publish because there's no upfront cost. If big journals cost a lot of money and small/free journals don't, then there's actually a force pushing towards cheaper options. It changes the customer to one that has more control (the funding body).

There are interesting initiatives like the Wellcome Trust's project: http://wellcomeopenresearch.org/

I'm also not sure what you're suggesting with "exercise their copyrights on prestigious journal title".

> Bibliometrics is the game of the publishers, and coincidentally, the biggest bibliometrics tools are made and sold by… publishers.

I think this comes from the fact that the metadata around publications is unfortunately often not available in a decent form, and the people who actually have the data that's necessary for analysing these kinds of things is publishers, so anyone who wants to do certain types of analysis will benefit from either being in or partnering with a publisher.

[disclaimer, working with article and grant data is what I do at Digital Science]