I did my bachelor thesis on a company that was acquired by elsevier for 100million USD. Elsevier (now called Relx) has a market cap of 60 billion USD. Getting a majority voting position would require dozens of billions probably. Counterfactual impact from allocating a couple dozen billion is much larger. So I think it’s not feasible nor recommendable.
It’s a bad system and maybe without much good infrastructure (innovative employees, legal environment etc) in place to be able to make it good within that system
Also worried that by buying them we will feel less compelled to build it into something better, this system has a decent chance of being disrupted soon (what Unjournal is trying to do, obviously)
I wouldn’t want to ‘reward the bad behavior’ and encourage future bad behavior by buying them out.
Caveats:
This may be a 1x thing so incentives may not matter.
I may be biased by my distaste for Elsevier and a misguided fairness concern
So one alternative is to have a preprint server like arXiv (where papers can be posted) that directly serves as a journal, potentially with peer reviews that are also posted. Independent of paper availability to the public, this would also save researchers’ time. (Instead of formatting papers to fit the Elsevier guidelines, they could be doing more research or training new researchers.)
At what price estimate do you think Elsevier can be acquired?
Could acquiring Elsevier and reforming it to be less rent-seeking be feasible?
I did my bachelor thesis on a company that was acquired by elsevier for 100million USD. Elsevier (now called Relx) has a market cap of 60 billion USD. Getting a majority voting position would require dozens of billions probably. Counterfactual impact from allocating a couple dozen billion is much larger. So I think it’s not feasible nor recommendable.
What is a lower bound for the maximal counterfactual impact from allocating a couple dozen billion dollars?
My take is
It’s a bad system and maybe without much good infrastructure (innovative employees, legal environment etc) in place to be able to make it good within that system
Also worried that by buying them we will feel less compelled to build it into something better, this system has a decent chance of being disrupted soon (what Unjournal is trying to do, obviously)
I wouldn’t want to ‘reward the bad behavior’ and encourage future bad behavior by buying them out.
Caveats:
This may be a 1x thing so incentives may not matter.
I may be biased by my distaste for Elsevier and a misguided fairness concern
What problem would this solve? And how does the existence of Sci-Hub change the calculus?
https://www.sci-hub.st
So one alternative is to have a preprint server like arXiv (where papers can be posted) that directly serves as a journal, potentially with peer reviews that are also posted. Independent of paper availability to the public, this would also save researchers’ time. (Instead of formatting papers to fit the Elsevier guidelines, they could be doing more research or training new researchers.)