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The arXiv website operates on less than $1M per year (source: Wikipedia page) and takes care of everything that is needed to disseminate knowledge except for ar

• vacri 10y ago
  arXiv only supports a handful of related disciplines, whereas Elsevier has literally thousands of journals in scores of disciplines. You're comparing apples to oranges. EasyChair is also something to run a conference with, not a blinded review system per se. Someone still has to drive the blinded reviews If you (royal 'you') think that navigating academic politics is so easy and Elsevier can be so massively undercut, then go for it. You'll make a ton of money with your <$1M infra and your low-budget review system - even if you charge only 10% of what Elsevier does. Don't forget either that you have to keep a legal team on-hand to deal with how you handle all this free information - after all, all the big open-source companies have legal teams, despite their info being 'free'. If you want to bring a giant like Elsevier down, the technical part is not the difficult part, though it is in itself a difficult project to do right.
  • a3_nm 10y ago
    > arXiv only supports a handful of related disciplines, whereas Elsevier has literally thousands of journals in scores of disciplines Yes, you should probably scale the operating costs of arXiv according to the number of papers published. arXiv's reported overall cost is a few dollars for each paper hosted. Compare this with Elsevier's subscription fees or most journal's $1000-plus fees to put your article in "author pays" open access. > Someone still has to drive the blinded reviews Yes, an editor, which in my field is essentially always an unpaid volunteer. > Don't forget either that you have to keep a legal team on-hand to deal with how you handle all this free information This should probably apply to arXiv to. Can you show me evidence that arXiv is having lots of legal trouble just because they are distributing PDFs? The only legal trouble I could see them getting into is essentially trolling from Elsevier et al about "their" papers getting uploaded. > If you (royal 'you') think that navigating academic politics is so easy I do not think this. I think we agree that, as you say, "the technical part is not the difficult part", but I disagree with you in that you seem to imply that large for-profit publishers are somehow necessary (see your earlier message, "from technical details to user workflows to reputation/trust to administrative politics to scientific politics to sourcing verification/reviews to a hundred more things I can't think of off the top of my head"). Again, Elsevier has a profit margin of 37%, which is ridiculously high, and shows that a large part of the money they take in is a net loss for research. Of its other operating costs, I suspect that lots cover things like lobbying, litigation, having useless booths to be seen at conferences, etc., that research doesn't need either.) To borrow an argument from https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/why-sci-hub-will-win-595b53aae9fa https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/why-sci-hub-will-win-595b5...: contrary to most fields of human activity, if large for-profit publishers were to disappear overnight, I'm confident that a self-organized, free, Internet-based way to distribute and review articles would take over very quickly and run at a fraction of the cost. This isn't just speculation: Sci-Hub already exists, works fine, and the main obstacle to its growth is copyright trolling from large publishers, not some intrinsic difficulty. So, in my opinion, the challenge to replace Elsevier is not technical (as you say), but it's not caused either by some intrinsic need for something like Elsevier: it's just a question of inertia of researchers and of the prestige of journals. Of course academic publishing is hard to do right, but Elsevier is not doing it right, they are simply milking the prestige of the venues and smaller publishing companies that they bought.