michael_nielsen

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

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!