Good for the University of California for canceling its subscriptions to Elsevier. Science doesn’t need for-profit journals.
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He points out that over and over not-for-profit journals were unwilling to expand into new areas. Often the pattern was that a for-profit would finally take up the slack (often followed years later by not-for-profits). I think this is a very large benefit of for-profits
More generally, you want orgs to be competing with one another to provide the best possible new services. Currently, the market in scientific publishing is badly broken for several structural reasons, & neither for-profit or not-for-profits are doing a good job innovating
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An example of such a structural reason comes from Andrew Odlyzko: Nuclear Physics B overtook Phys Rev D by lowering author page charges (while jacking up prices). Result: authors sent their best papers their, but prices dramatically rose.
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The issue: the people effectively making purchasing decisions (faculty) were price-sensitive... but to the wrong price! This is a problem with having money come out of the wrong budget (libraries, rather than the faculty who influence library decisions).
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There's a nice paper to be written on all the separate structural issues which prevent this market from being competitive and encouraging innovation, IMO. Banning for-profits will likely make it worse (also IMO). Anyways, rant over!
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