I’m Jonathan Nankivell, an undergraduate in my last year studying Mathematics. My interests are in ML and collaborative epistemics.
I had to discover EA twice before it stuck. My first random walk was ‘psychology → big five framework → principle component analysis → pol.is → radical exchange → EA’ and my second was ‘effect of social media → should I read the news? → Ezra Klein on the 80,000 hours podcast → EA’.
We could, of course, simply get the future fund to pay for this. There is, however, an alternative that might be worth thinking about.
This seems like the kind of thing that dominant assurance contracts are designed to solve. We could run a Kickstarter, and use the future fund to pay the early backers if we fail to reach the target amount. This should incentivise all those who want the journals bought to chip in.
Here is one way we could do this:
Use a system like pol.is to identify points of consensus between universities. This should be about the rules going forward if we buy the journal. For example, do they all want pre-registration? What should the copyright situation be? How should peer-review work? How should the journal be ran? etc
Whatever the consensus is, commit to implementing it if the buyout is successful
Start crowdsourcing the funds needed. To maximise the chance of success, this should be done using a DAC (dominant assurance contract). This works like any other crowdfunding mechanism (GoFundMe, Kickstarter, etc), except we have a pool of money that is used to pay the early backers if we fail to meet the goal. If the standard donation size we’re asking the unis for is £X, and having the publisher bought is worth at least £X to the uni, then the the dominant strategy for the uni is to chip in.
If we raise the money, great! We can do what we committed to doing. We’re happy, the unis are happy, the shareholders of the publisher are happy. If we fail to raise the money, we pay all the early backers, and move on to other things.