> Publishers add value in their role as gatekeepers and filters.
And yet the peer review process relies on unpaid volunteers. Sure, there's some kudos. But the publishers are laughing all the way to the bank.
> They provide an objective, systematic evaluation of research
Publication bias is a thing. A hugely significant thing.
> Piracy is not an alternative to publishing, so it isn't a competitor
This is an odd semantic nitpick without any discernable meaning. I feel very certain that many who benefit from working within academic publication see piracy as a threat to their revenue streams, hence "competition".
> piracy destroys the market
No, the market has simply changed.
> We need to collaboratively imagine and build a better system for communicating and evaluating science
You ignored the best argument: what does PLOS (a non-profit) do with those $2000 they charge the author?
Nobody is disputing that Elsevier et al make a profit that isn't entirely deserved. You don't have to argue that point.
But that glosses over the fact that their revenue is absolutely not pure profit. PLOS shows that there are costs associated with publishing, even if you get a lot of the work for free. Those $2000 are the value that publishers provide. Maybe they're charging $5000 for those $2000 right now, and that's morally suspect. But when that business model is destroyed, someone has to come up with a way to finance those $2000 of value by other means.
Also:
> Publication bias is a thing. A hugely significant thing.
"Publication bias" isn't the arbitrary injection of a publisher's opinions into articles or something like that. It just describes the fact that more surprising, or positive results are more likely to get published.
Doing away with publishers won't have any effect on this mechanism. Any sort of ranking or discovery mechanism will ultimately prefer the more spectacular result, because that's what people are looking for. In the specific case of pharmacology, mandatory pre-registration of trials, and all-encompassing meta-analysis of those is a good strategy, and it's completely orthogonal to the process of publishing the paper.
> piracy as a threat to their revenue streams, hence "competition"
By your logic, I can "compete" with GM by stealing all of their car inventory and blowing up all their factories in Detroit. I don't think that makes sense.
> the market has simply changed
Strongly disagree. What exactly is the new market? Selling journal t-shirts?
> yet the peer review process relies on unpaid volunteers
> Publication bias is a thing
I say that publishers add much more value than pirates. Sure, publishers aren't perfect and others add value too. So what?
And yet the peer review process relies on unpaid volunteers. Sure, there's some kudos. But the publishers are laughing all the way to the bank.
> They provide an objective, systematic evaluation of research
Publication bias is a thing. A hugely significant thing.
> Piracy is not an alternative to publishing, so it isn't a competitor
This is an odd semantic nitpick without any discernable meaning. I feel very certain that many who benefit from working within academic publication see piracy as a threat to their revenue streams, hence "competition".
> piracy destroys the market
No, the market has simply changed.
> We need to collaboratively imagine and build a better system for communicating and evaluating science
On this I completely agree.