michael_nielsen

One response is to say "Oh, the NSF [or whoever] should give a lot more funding."

I'm sympathetic, but only as a stopgap. It's not a good long-run solution. If centralized authorities are providing money, you end with the arXiv (or whoever) as a de facto incumbent, being funded by decisions made by a small group of ppl. This is a recipe for stagnation, at best

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.

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.