michael_nielsen

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.

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.

That's my view of the problems. What of the solutions? How to create a healthy competitive marketplace in scientific publishing?

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