I legit don’t get how come there isn’t some government funded publication platform. No other endeavor has as much bang for buck. Arxiv needs $2.5m a year https://arxiv.org/about/reports-financials which is chump change.
We still don't have a proper open /free tax filing too from the IRS or tax computed by IRS only for us to verify/confirm as in some of other countries, primarily because intuit (and others) lobbied to make sure the government would never develop one (encoded in law no less), so it is not that surprising that a community benefiting project that threatens some big business revenues has no government funding available.
It's incredibly annoying that publications try to continue to exist in order to act as a gatekeeper to exclusive papers. If journals added real value by peer-reviewing, collating, curating, offering editorial opinion etc then the fact papers are also available in the raw state somewhere else wouldn't much of a threat.
An online ecosystem like Arxiv can very easily supersede a journal if they want to.
For example Arxiv say could deploy a public peer review process i.e. reviews, criticisms and comments on the paper could be available next to paper in Arxiv without a lot of effort technically. Similarly curation and collation could easily taken up for free by community. Any of this would upend journals in quality or throughput easily. There are no problems journals solve that online cannot do better not even exclusivity they charge so much for.
After all there are enough people to moderate reddit or do various quality control tasks in StackOverflow for not much benefit, researchers who curate on Arxiv could easily be found and they may even get a job boost.
Building that community and acceptance is the hard part everything else is relatively trival.
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Open Access especially for government funded research should be mandatory. Same for software, any thing government invests to develop should be open source.
On the other hand, PubMed exists.
My guess is, for a preprint archive, network effects are paramount, and ArXiv was there first. It’s not directly a government project, but is still funded by US government grants and hosted by Stanford (now that the international mirror network is shut down, which does give me a slightly jittery feeling).
[1] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/
[2] https://groups.google.com/g/isl-development/c/JGaMo2VUu_8
https://www.cadc-ccda.hia-iha.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/en/
It probably helps that it is run under the auspices of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics.
If you're suggesting it as alternative for academic publishing in general, it would cost a lot more.
Arxiv isn't a "publication platform" in the sense that peer-reviewed journals are. The cost of hosting and distributing PDFs is close to zero, obviously. What does cost money is the copyediting and running the peer review process.
People think Elsevier are the worst people in the world (not entirely wrong) and taking in millions while exploiting the free labor of authors and reviewers. But it's relatively easy to quantify the value they do add: their financials are public and, last I checked, they have operating margins of about 30 %.
Let's say we could do without their marketing and billing departments and that gets us to a margin of 50 %. That's pretty good, but it isn't quite the rip-off people sometimes suggest it is. Replacing the commercial publishers with government-funded open-access journals would be a billion-dollar endeavor, not a few million for servers and a bit of software.
Running the reviewing process can also happen through https://openreview.net
Not sure why we need Elsevier exactly, could you be more specific?
It is peculiar that the model of fundraising via newspaper ads and a couple of wealthy donors (including in some cases the national government, yes) doesn’t seem to have survived past the world wars, but to say that private funding never resulted in any social good is preposterous. Something has happened in the last century or so, but it’s trickier than that.
Calling a hoogheemraadschap a private enterprise is calling a government one. If it acts like a government it is one even if it is not benefitting everyone equally (still no difference though).
That you can not rely on the rich to put their money in good use with the general public in mind is right. Does it happen? Yes. Does it happen often? Definitely not.
(similar thing in education involved deciding "equality" was bad, so they invented "equity", which is the same thing except they like it.)
> Other than some medical research, charity has never solved a single social ill.
This is very broad and incorrect statement that I suggest you research more before stating as fact. Maybe start with libraries in the 19th and 20th century if you don’t know where to start.
Important to note that this is not some innate "want"; their careers depend on it. It's a means to an ends, the ends being being able to keep practicing science.
(Of course prestige-by-proxy will play a role as well, but it's not what's keeping the system in place.)
Here in the UK, there is a big research evaluation exercise called the REF. The REF is important because it largely determines how the government allocates funds. In order to be eligible to be evaluated, researchers have to essentially submit their pre-prints into open access.
What this has meant for the last 10+ years is that most universities participating in the REF have an e-prints server, like the arxiv. Obviously, being publically funded, universities are then using government money to pay for these costs.
Now your question might be whether it's sensible for the entire country (or research councils) to operate their own e-prints server. I don't know the answer to this.
All I know is that the more bureaucracy you involve, the more bullshit results.