michael_nielsen

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

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.

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.

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!

scientific journals (or other experiments in compilation/editing/publication) seem like a good match for the @zhitzig @glenweyl @VitalikButerin proposal of philanthropy matched by (sum of square roots)^2 of individual contributions, “quadratic finance” or “liberal radicalism”.

(Description here https://www.ssrn.com/abstract=3243656 … , @zhitzig recently gave a more accessible presentation which i think will be made available soon. It has genuinely nice characteristics.)