Here's a Twitter thread with a director at Elsevier (@mrgunn) making extremely snarky comments about why they think academia shouldn't be free and widely available: https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600
Alexandra Elbakyan has done and will do more for science than this rent-seeking asshole will ever do.
If there was a way to open source curation and not lose quality, I can't imagine anyone would disagree with that - even the people who work at these organisations.
Unfortunately, what you end up with is arxiv, while very useful for sure, has no curation.
Everyone just keeps bleeting - we want free! But they don't bother to think about how to do actually do it. How to ensure quality curation remains which is absolutely so critical to the advancement of science.
I've been fantasizing about free everything since forever. Who hasn't? But at some point we have to stop trying to fantasize our way to results.
This is like underpants gnomes logic - steal underpants .. .. .. .. quality curation!
Also, MrGunn is a moron commenting on that thread. Why not just hand out free subscriptions to rare disease patients? What a trivially cost less PR move.
Your argument equates to "they have maintained their grip, therefore they're providing real value".
Their stranglehold seems to come primarily from academic incentives to publish in prestigious journals.
> The idea that after 23 years of internet they've maintained their position via smart deals is ludicrous.
Perhaps someone has claimed that, but I don't recall ever seeing that argument.
Science without curation will fall to corporate shills and propagandists with political axes to grind. It's already bad enough but with no gatekeepers at all it would be a total free for all. Tobacco would become good for you again, homeopathy would work, etc.
Curation can be democratic, but if so there must be a well thought out procedure for electing curators and a constitution or set of bylaws that is hard to amend. Science has a lot of power, so any scientific curation system is going to come under constant attack. We are living in the age of information warfare.
Grant agencies receive money from taxes and those funds are devoted to science instead of other public projects. That the output of this work is not generally available to the public is the problem.
Most researchers will never feel this problem since their libraries will have access to the journals that they need. Publishers in general will just charge for access and not see the issue. It is only when you go out as a member of the general public and attempt to read some journal article, presumably funded by your taxes, that you will realize that you haven't had a voice in all of this.
Shiran Pasternak What is a reasonable profit margin for a platform for communicating publicly
funded research? Non-rhetorical question.
mrgunn For a publicly traded company, the answer is "what the market will bear".
Krista Jamieson offers a great perspective.
The same goes for everyone who works there. They have either found a way to justify that what they do is ethical and okay, or would quit. That's just human nature.
Either way, I don't think he's helping the image issue.
Sci-Hub hosts 85% of the articles published in paywalled scholarly journals on a shoe-string.
I'm not saying current publishers are great at these things, just that they should not be forgotten and should be improved on if a new order was to take shape.
I remember but can't find a citation for an apocryphal story that the administrative overhead of metering, tracking and billing phone calls in the Ma Bell days was more than 50% of the cost.