I think this, like healthcare, is a place where the world needs to reckon with the limits on the usefulness of profit motive. There are a lot of benefits to capitalism, and it has produced both societal wealth and innovation in a lot of contexts. But there are some clear cases where the most profitable way to use a resource is a net harm to humanity, and organizing it in a way that removes that motive is the most parsimonious solution. Nationalizing and then freeing scientific information, as this article proposes, is a solution that has widespread support among the experts generating the actual knowledge that would be shared, has obvious compounding benefits, and only harms a business model. I think so many people have become disillusioned with the promise of capitalism and profit motive precisely because we keep insisting that it needs to be our only tool in every situation, with frequently disastrous consequences.
I agree with your diagnosis, however I would not like the government to appoint editors of research journals: that seems rife with opportunities for abuse. Also, article selection is an editorial process, so I'd expect that government-run journals will quickly be targets of free speech lawsuits.
What are the core functions of a journal?
1. facilitate reviews
2. distribute articles selected through #1
It seems to me that #2 is where the potential for restrictive and exploitative business models really shows up. The curation function #1 should be something that can be accomplished at nominal expense. Universities should be able to fund that collaboratively for very low cost, pro-socially without a need to recuperate those costs. Why don't we see that? I suspect that it's the existing journal industry blocking such a development.
I agree, the process of peer review is something that should probably be done by academic institutions with neither corporate nor governmental oversight, and seems like something they're mostly happy to do, as evidenced by so many journals getting the work of expert scholars as peer-reviewers for free. As someone in a different comment thread pointed out, part of the barrier for such a move is that funding decisions build journals in as a gatekeeper, so effectively funding is locked behind publication. It's possible that simply removing the publishers from the equation would create the result everyone but them seems to want "automagically"
