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
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What you really want is to encourage the arXiv to grow & innovate, _and_ also to fund potential competitors who aim to do even better than the arXiv. And, if things are healthy, they will replace the arXiv.
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So, to come back to where we started: are for-profits bad? Should we aim for a not-for-profit future in scientific publishing?
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I hope it's clear these questions miss the point. Better questions are: what's the growth model for innovation? Is the market set up to enable the flourishing of many good new ideas that will benefit humanity? At the moment, it's not doing a great job, in my opinion.
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Instead, incumbent organizations maximize revenue in ways that do serve some social job (journals are good things), but far less than could be done, and often with a lot of negative behaviours. This is true both of for-profits like Elsevier, & of many not-for-profit publishers
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Go take a look at the American Chemical Society, a not-for-profit publisher with billions in revenue. Historically they've been far more hostile to ideas like open access and open data than Elsevier & the other large for-profit publishers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Chemical_Society#Controversies …
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Many other not-for-profit society publishers aren't much better. Any serious argument that "for-profits are bad" needs to engage with this fact.
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So, what to do? A lot of progress so far has come from things like the Bermuda Principles, whereby the NIH and Wellcome Trust essentially forced biologists to share human genome data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Principles …
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Or the NIH public access policy, which requires NIH-funded research papers to be shared after an embargo period: https://publicaccess.nih.gov/
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I'm a huge fan of these and similar actions, and of people and organizations like
@hjoseph,@petersuber,@SPARC_NA and the many, many others who helped them become a reality. These are some of the most important accomplishments of humanity in the past decades.Show this thread -
At the same time, over the long run we want to avoid running things through centralized control. Command-and-control economies have a terrible historical record, and usually end up inhibiting innovation.
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That's my view of the problems. What of the solutions? How to create a healthy competitive marketplace in scientific publishing?
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There's not going to be a silver bullet. It's going to require hundreds of changes. One crucial change is getting existing funders to take software tools seriously. Budgets for tools, for programmers, for long-term maintenance, & VC / grants for new organizations to develop tools
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And payment for services needs to align incentives: the people benefiting from the services should be paying for them, to set up the virtuous feedback loop: genuinely better service => more revenue.
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This is a tough problem for open * solutions (open access, data, code, collaboration). It still hasn't been solved in the world of open source software. Though companies like Kickstarter and Patreon and ideas like dominant assurance contracts are making progress in this space.
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Still, I'm optimistic we can solve these problems. Danny Hillis has observed that "there are problems that are impossible if you think about them in two-year terms - which everyone does - but they're easy if you think in fifty-year terms." I think this is a problem of this type!
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Addendum: This tweet's sole purpose is to make the previous tweet grammatically correct.
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End of conversation
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