[TeMPOraL]

The answer to your question is literally in the first paragraph of that comment.

> This is a system that emerged over centuries, and using your top-down hammer may change it in the short-run, but it will invariably morph into something unintended and unexpected if the proper incentives are not in place to guarantee long-term success.

I.e. scientific publishing, like almost everything else that involves humans, is a dynamic system. Smash it, and it will reconstruct itself in some form or other. If you don't change underlying incentives, you'll end up in a similar state with which you started. See also: comments that refer to "regrettable substitution" in the comment page here.

It's not "Silicon Valley economics", it's just a basic application of reason.

[csydas]

I think the difference here is that the system itself is vestigal; JSTOR et. al. made sense when there was not a convenient collection or distribution method for journals, but at this point, such groups are not providing any actual benefit that could not be replicated for an extremely minimal cost by the journals themselves, or just abandoning the cost altogether. Already, many fields have started publishing pre-prints for free on various sites and the model works fine.

I appreciate caution as much as the next person, but we've been operating with the natural alternatives for some time now without any issues; the incentives for researchers and universities when it comes to publishing articles hasn't really changed, nor has the incentive for the the public (academics or otherwise) that want to consume them. The only part of this system that has an incentive to keep the old system is the publishers themselves, because they're no longer a required component. Their infrastructure and their pricing schemes are no longer beneficial and have been replaced, while the incentives for the researchers publishing and the audience consuming are provided and met by the replacement systems.

Removing the publishers isn't a hammer destroying it from the top-down, it's an appendectomy like prodecure.