Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

To be clear, Elsevier generally demands exclusive publishing rights to academic research *funded by the public,* which it then sells back to the university system in multimillion-dollar journal bundles. This is paywall-as-a-service. Thrilled to see UC call it.

fwiw, I'm not against for-profit journals; I'm against publicly funded research orgs granting *exclusive* publishing rights to for-profit journals. For all its "value adds," I wonder how much less Elsevier would have to charge if it weren't the only game in town

If the editorial layer adds so much value — if Elsevier is so much better at organizing solid peer review processes & separating outstanding work from questionable work — welp, that's a service it can provide with or without exclusive rights to the research. I'm all for it.

I'm not being totally flippant; I absolutely see a path forward for research curation as a profitable niche in academia. Competitive pressures could nudge it out of its static pre-web format while simultaneously encouraging an explosion of new ideas in pre-reg, peer review, etc.

This happens today - preprints are posted by researchers to preprint servers such as Arxiv, @biorxivpreprint, or @SSRN and there's a construct called an overlay journal that does curation.

I’m not necessarily talking about a literal print magazine, I’m talking about a format that was designed for print & essentially just pushed online. The modern web enables *way* more flexible information products