alt Hacker News20 years ago, that argument would make sense. They had no competition and could do what they wanted. As an earlier comment stated: that is starting to change, and if they wait until open competitors are fully established, then it will be too late. Now is the time for them to realize that their parasitic business model is coming to an end and they need to change if they want to survive long term.
They can of course choose short term profits over long term viability, which wouldn't be all that surprising, but that changes the explanation from "more profits" to "short-sightedness/incompetence"
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They have no competition on any given paper that they hold the rights to.
Oh they are very aware of the threat. But their weapon of choice is the legal system and regulatory capture, not improving their product.
Do you think these papers have the economic position they have because they are better than some competitor? Or because they have copyright: they provide exclusive access to some important things ...
The time was more than a decade ago. They've consistently chosen to do nothing more than make vague noises about improving.
In addition to the high seas we've got a plethora of preprint services. Between arxiv and bioarxiv alone you can access a decent chunk of the modern literature. What we need at this point is for institutions to require uploading all publications to one of a handful of officially sanctioned preprint services under a CC license and to strictly forbid publishing with any venue that objects to authors disseminating a CC licensed version of the work.