michael_nielsen

This is reflected in many ways: most obviously, the many mergers and acquisitions of publishers, giving increased economies of scale. This has the very unfortunate by-product of reducing competition.

It also means that many (not all) of the people running scientific publishing are business people who specialize in managing operations (driving down operating costs while maintaining revenue), and in sales and marketing

An example: IIRC Derk Haank, the CEO of Elsevier from 1998-2004 and of Springer, later Springer-Nature, from 2004 to 2017, did his PhD on economies of scale.

Nothing intrinsically wrong with this. But we're at a time in history where the socially beneficial act isn't driving down operating costs while maintaining revenue. It's producing marvellous new tools, increasing access, etc. Current market structure isn't supporting this well

Brokenness 3: The lack of growth models for the best new ideas. An example is the arXiv preprint server. It's one of humanity's great achievements of the past 30 years. Just in economic terms, over the long run it will generate trillions of dollars in social utility for humanity

Remember seeing this tweet a few months ago and it just popped back into my head. Pretty interested - how sure are you it’ll be trillions?

Sure? It depends on the exact meaning of the statement - one could formalize it in different ways. But in what seem the most reasonable interpretation it seems extremely likely.

Put the preprint server in 1800 and ask what effect it would have on the development of electromagnetism. It's quite plausible it speeds up the development of entire industries by many years. So just that one instance can plausibly be associated with ~ 10^9 dollars, IMO.