michael_nielsen

So, to come back to where we started: are for-profits bad? Should we aim for a not-for-profit future in scientific publishing?

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.

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

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 …

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.

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 …

Or the NIH public access policy, which requires NIH-funded research papers to be shared after an embargo period: https://publicaccess.nih.gov/ 

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.