In my view a free market cant include massive asymmetries of power between actors. Individual authors face large costs for not playing the game, and Elsevier and others have used their market power to do everything they can to perpetuate a stupid system of intellectual snobbery that keeps them incumbent. Authors are in small part to blame, but mostly they are the victims.
Most real problems in the world are coordination problems, where one motivated/coordinated entity sits on an essential “toll bridge”, and the whole world can theoretically just coordinate to route around them. But because “everyone else in the world” is a huge number of people with their own mixed up set of incentives, and the solution doesn’t work unless a critical mass coordinates to do the same thing, this turns out to be really hard.
> They don't need to work with any formal publisher. LaTeX and the Internet make it easier than ever. Nobody needs any of the publishers to get their work out.
That's not how academia works, though. It would be great if it did, but it doesn't.
