michael_nielsen

But isn’t one problem of the nonprofit publishers the fact that they are running the journal as a moneymaker to fund their other work? Of so then of course their practices don’t differ from the for profit publishers.

That's pretty common, yes. And yes, their business model is often very similar to the for-profits. So much so that one common arrangement is that society journals are often published by one of the big for-profit publishers (who take a cut).

One in-principle difference is governance, e.g: not-for-profits are beholden to their membership. In practice, I'm not sure I've ever seen this make a big difference to behaviour, although I haven't watched that closely. Someone like @petersuber might know of an instance?

Concretely: someone runs for President of a society a platform of making the society journal open access. But I don't recall an instance of this happening.

At @improvingpsych the board made sure the journal (@CollabraOA) is OA & helps run @PsyArXiv, to be consistent w/ mission & serve members.

That is really really great, but doesn't make me more optimistic about societies being very progressive, because SIPS had the unique(?) advantages of starting from scratch (no attachment to a subscription journal's revenue) and being all about openness (self-selection process).

Older societies thus have the financial conflict of depending on subscription revenue for present operations. Very difficult to convince them to abandon that, and very hard to wean them even if they agree. That's another reason to support the end-run open access route: preprints.

Ultimately, though, you want money to be supporting the best new models (and successor models, when those are found). And so far we haven't found a really good decentralized way to support preprints and whatever better models come after preprints.