[jrumbut]

What's most bothersome is there is work for them to do.

How about assigning a real copy editor with subject matter expertise? How about publishing open source libraries that automatically validate and output visualizations for their formats? How about hosting multimedia supplements?

It would not be difficult at all to earn the money they charge. There is so much room for creativity and innovation and adding value in scientific publishing.

[vitally3643]

That sounds an awful lot like "costs" which seriously compromises the "free profit" model.

Why pay money to make a better product when you can pay zero money for a worse product and no change in subscriptions? What are your customers gonna do, go get the paper somewhere else?

[MostlyStable]

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"

[HPsquared]

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

[12_throw_away]

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.

[thayne]

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

[spwa4]

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 ...

[GTP]

Yes, many students and researchers resort to piracy.

[monocasa]

The students and researchers weren't the customers, but instead the large institutions they belong to. In a sense, they should be the same from this context, but the amount of consolidation that has occurred in the academic publishing space means that large institutions don't really have the same plausible deniability that their individual members do.

[leephillips]

Well, yes. There are several ways to get papers:

https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/

[PaulHoule]

I was involved with arXiv when it first came to Cornell (blame me if you can't get an endorsement!) and we did plenty of analysis about the cost structure of academic publishing.

When we looked at well-run noncommercial journals, like The Physical Review, the cost was justified by exception handling in the peer review process. The average peer review case goes smoothly but if somebody has a complaint and there a lot of appeals and reviews the cost can skyrocket.

Our cost structure was $3-$5 a paper but we struggled to get even that. arXiv was unfunded at Los Alamos and I think Cornell never appreciated the value that it created for the world, had we found a way to capture a few percent of the value we created we would have been "sustainable" but I think that is incompatible with running it on a shoestring the way we did.

I am not enthusiastic about arXiv being independent, I don't have any problem with the high salary they want to pay the director, you are going to pay that for a good non-profit manager in NYC but you could just as easily pay that much for a bad non-profit manager.

I have nightmares though that had arXiv been independent in the 2000s somebody I know might have wound up at Epstein's island not because I think he's evil or perverse but rather because he's naive [1]. arXiv is a gem that would be attractive to somebody like Epstein and would be very possible for somebody like that to have funded it 100% back then. As it is it will be sucked into a somewhat corrupt NGO-industrial complex and end up spending $30-$50 a paper just on fundraising. It's sad.

[1] so many people who got in his circle strike me like children who were playing in the street and got hit by a car, and you'd hope people in those leadership positions should have better judgement