michael_nielsen

There's been a lot of associated commentary of the form "let's get the evil for-profits out of science". This commentary is well-intentioned, but misdiagnoses the underlying problems.

My thinking about the role of for-profits started to change after reading John Willinsky's pro-open access book "The Access Principle".

Willinsky points out that in the second half of the 20th century, not-for-profit society publishers were often remarkably conservative. A new adjacent sub-field of science would open up, they'd respond "not our area", and only very slowly expand the scope of their journals.

Much of the slack was taken up by for-profit publishers, who were far more willing to provide a space for people developing new sub-fields of science.

That helped researchers in new sub-fields establish legitimacy, and build out those sub-fields. It was a case where for-profit publishers and the profit motive were serving a broad social good.

Okay, that's food for thought, but I doubt this specific effect is all that large.

There's a broader & more important point though: we want a scientific publishing system where someone can start a new journal / repository / database (etc), & if it serves society as a whole better than existing solutions, it will rapidly grow to replace or augment them.

For instance: all other things equal we want well-run open access journals to grow & outcompete even well-run closed access journals, since the OA journals provide more social benefit.

To the extent journals, databases, and other services remain closed access, we want prices to come down, while maintaining or increasing the rate at which those services improve.

We want socially beneficial ideas like preprint repositories, open data archives, open code platforms, and so on, to thrive and grow, and to try out experimental ideas.

Ideally, we want a thriving ecosystem of these things, with the best - meaning, the most beneficial for society as a whole (not just the publishers, or just scientists) - rapidly growing and flourishing.

There's many systemic reasons this isn't happening at the moment. The market is terribly inefficient. Here's a few structural ways the market is broken.

Brokenness 1: Perverse incentives. A nice illustrative story from Andrew Odlyzko (https://firstmonday.org/article/view/542/463#IV …. ). In the 1970s Elsevier's journal Nuclear Physics B took over as the top journal in particle physics, from Physical Review D.

The underlying trouble is that researchers have a lot of power over buying decisions by university libraries, but do not bear the cost of those decisions (the libraries do). So they're price-insensitive. Such a separation of decision-making power from costs leads to bad outcomes

Instead of having a market where maximizing revenues also means maximizing social benefit, we have a dreadfully inefficient market where maximizing revenue benefits no-one _except_ the publisher.

Brokenness 2: The big deal. Journals used to be sold a la carte. But beginning in 1996 was the era of the era of "the big deal" (e.g. https://poynder.blogspot.com/2012/10/open-access-in-uk-reinventing-big-deal.html … ). Instead of buying journals individually, libraries bought them in big bundles, sometimes of thousands of journals.

In many ways this was good. The internet meant that publishing infrastructure could be centralized, giving big publishers economies of scale. Bundling passed some of those economies of scale onto customers.

But it had many negative consequences. It meant that journals became a commodity bought in bulk, typically distinguished only by a very imperfect brand / quality marker like impact factor.

This was happening at a time when experimental new ideas should have been flourishing. At such a time you don't want things bought in bulk, you want them bought bespoke, based on highly idiosyncratic and individual criteria.

And so instead of competing on the basis of amazing new product types, increased product quality, & increased access, publishers instead compete by achieving economies of scale, driving down operating costs while maintaining revenue, improved sales, & maximizing brand lock-in.

This is reflected in many ways: most obviously, the many mergers and acquisitions of publishers, giving increased economies of scale. This has the very unfortunate by-product of reducing competition.

It also means that many (not all) of the people running scientific publishing are business people who specialize in managing operations (driving down operating costs while maintaining revenue), and in sales and marketing

An example: IIRC Derk Haank, the CEO of Elsevier from 1998-2004 and of Springer, later Springer-Nature, from 2004 to 2017, did his PhD on economies of scale.

Nothing intrinsically wrong with this. But we're at a time in history where the socially beneficial act isn't driving down operating costs while maintaining revenue. It's producing marvellous new tools, increasing access, etc. Current market structure isn't supporting this well

Brokenness 3: The lack of growth models for the best new ideas. An example is the arXiv preprint server. It's one of humanity's great achievements of the past 30 years. Just in economic terms, over the long run it will generate trillions of dollars in social utility for humanity

If it captured just a tiny fraction, the arXiv would have a budget of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Instead, the arXiv has struggled to make budget for much of its existence. It can't grow or innovate the way it should, & changes at a glacial pace.

No criticism of the arXiv intended - this is a consequence of a systemic factor: the lack of good growth models that enable great services to grow and change and improve.

You see this pattern repeated over and over for a tonne of new tools. Great new tool, no growth model. And so they stagnate and languish.

One response is to say "Oh, the NSF [or whoever] should give a lot more funding."