I was on the debate team in high school. There’s a type of debate, called Policy, where one team proposes a government policy and the other team argues the policy is bad. The rules of Policy debate don’t say who the debaters are pretending to be: they could be congresspeople, cabinet members, or staff at a think tank. This creates ambiguity, and nerds are great at exploiting ambiguity. A popular strategy was to argue that the opponents had a perfectly good policy, but were wrong about who should implement it. This had reasonable forms (no, congress does not have the power to do X) but could also get very silly (the crux of one debate was whether the supreme court or the undersecretary of the TSA was the best authority to usher in a Malthusian dictatorship). When debating policy, “who” could be much more important than “what”.

Occasionally, when I see people argue that something needs to be done, I ask myself this question. Who, precisely, should do it?

Recently, I saw a tweet complaining about scientific publishing. Physicists put their work out for free on arXiv.org, then submit that work to journals, which charge huge fees either to the scientists themselves or to libraries that want access to the work. It’s a problem academics complain about frequently, but usually we act like it’s something we should fix ourselves, a kind of grassroots movement to change our publication and hiring culture.

This tweet, surprisingly, didn’t do that. Instead, it seemed to have a different “who” in mind. The tweet argued that the stranglehold of publishers like Elsevier on academic publishing is a waste of taxpayer money. The implication, maybe intended maybe not, is that the problem should be fixed by the taxpayers: that is, by the government.

Which in turn got me thinking, what could that look like?

I could imagine a few different options, from the kinds of things normal governments do to radical things that would probably never happen.

First, the most plausible strategy: collective negotiation. Particle physicists don’t pay from our own grants to publish papers, and we don’t pay to read them. Instead, we have a collective agreement, called SCOAP3, where the big institutions pay together each year to guarantee open access. The University of California system tried to negotiate a similar agreement a few years back, not just for physicists but for all fields. You could imagine governments leaning on this, with the university systems of whole countries negotiating a fixed payment. The journals would still be getting paid, but less.

Second, less likely but not impossible: governments could use the same strategies against the big publishers that they use against other big companies. This could be antitrust action (if you have to publish in Nature to get hired, are they really competing with anybody?), or even some kind of price controls. The impression I get is that when governments do try to change scientific publishing they usually do it via restrictions on the scientists (such as requiring them to publish open-access), while this would involve restrictions on the publishers.

Third, governments could fund alternative institutions to journals. They could put more money into websites like arXiv.org and its equivalents in other fields or fund an alternate review process to vet papers like journal referees do. There are existing institutions they could build on, or they could create their own.

Fourth, you could imagine addressing the problem on the job market side, with universities told not to weigh the prestige of journals when considering candidates. This seems unlikely to happen, and that’s probably a good thing, because it’s very micromanagey. Still, I do think that both grants and jobs could do with less time and effort spent attempting to vet candidates and more explicit randomness.

Fifth, you could imagine governments essentially opting out of the game altogether. They could disallow spending any money from publicly funded grants or universities on open-access fees or subscription fees, pricing most scientists out of the journal system. Journals would either have to radically lower their prices so that scientists could pay for them out of pocket, or more likely go extinct. This does have the problem that if only some countries did it, their scientists would have a harder time in other countries’ job markets. And of course, many critics of journals just want the journals to make less obscene profits, and not actually go extinct.

Most academics I know agree that something is deeply wrong with how academic journals work. While the situation might be solved at the grassroots level, it’s worth imagining what governments might do. Realistically, I don’t expect them to do all that much. But stranger things have gotten political momentum before.