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Comment by MostlyStable | Hacker News Reader

20 years ago, that argument would make sense. They had no competition and could do what they wanted. As an earlier comment stated: that is starting to change, and if they wait until open competitors are fully established, then it will be too late. Now is the time for them to realize that their parasitic business model is coming to an end and they need to change if they want to survive long term.

They can of course choose short term profits over long term viability, which wouldn't be all that surprising, but that changes the explanation from "more profits" to "short-sightedness/incompetence"

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The time was more than a decade ago. They've consistently chosen to do nothing more than make vague noises about improving.

In addition to the high seas we've got a plethora of preprint services. Between arxiv and bioarxiv alone you can access a decent chunk of the modern literature. What we need at this point is for institutions to require uploading all publications to one of a handful of officially sanctioned preprint services under a CC license and to strictly forbid publishing with any venue that objects to authors disseminating a CC licensed version of the work.

It would be nice if billion dollar big tech, in particular those that have R&D donate and form a not-for-profit together with universities that puts this to sleep once and for all. The small irony is that they're paying to submit their own research to another company to make it publicly available.

Oh they are very aware of the threat. But their weapon of choice is the legal system and regulatory capture, not improving their product.

They have no competition on any given paper that they hold the rights to.

Well, maybe no competition when we're talking about institutional access rights on dry land. However, for everyone else, there's quite a bit of competition out there in the high seas.

That's only for individual usage, which, I assume, is small potatoes compared to institutional usage. No major research institution is going to use piracy as an institutional policy, and neither is it going to boycott Springer, since at least some researchers would put up a fuss—because you don't just need access to lots of papers, sometimes you need access to that specific paper.

> No major research institution is going to use piracy as an institutional policy

But they could adopt an official policy of all publications being CC licensed and uploaded to at least one of a few officially sanctioned preprint services. That would do a lot to undercut the publishers going forward.

At this point a lot becomes open access after a few years anyway. The issue is historic papers but all of those can be reliably found on the high seas.

Do you think these papers have the economic position they have because they are better than some competitor? Or because they have copyright: they provide exclusive access to some important things ...

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