michael_nielsen

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.

(No criticism of Jupyter or @distillpub intended - I love both (& am on distill's steering committee). But both are, intentionally AFAICT, more oriented toward being widely-used platforms than being experimental media forms.)

To put it another way, the world described in your tweet has been here for decades in physics. And the pace of innovation in physics publishing is absolutely glacial. That's because that market is almost entirely broken and non-competitive.

As a comparison: I believe @github has done at least as much to change the publishing of open source software over the last 3 months as the arXiv has done over the last 20 years.