michael_nielsen

An interesting point made in John Willinsky's (very pro-open access) book "The Access Principle": the not-for-profit publishers have been much more conservative in many ways than the for-profits.

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

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.

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).

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!

There’s no reason to ban for-profits. But I foresee a future publication system where everyone submits to relatively open preprint servers, and non-profit open-access “journals” live on top of them and provide peer review. Innovation should be easy in such a world.

The arXiv has barely changed in 20+ years. We still write pdf documents - not even JavaScript+HTML, much less anything more interesting. I think of things like @distillpub & Jupyter as very conservative... and yet they are decades ahead of arXiv.