When you really think about it, it's pretty enraging. How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering? What could we have accomplished if knowledge flowed more freely?
I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, but the system that we have now seems broken.
I know this is a controversial view, but how much progress has been lost to intellectual property in general? I do not think the temporary monopoly on an idea incentives innovation. If it does, it encourages the people who I don't want to be innovating in the first place. If someone sees that as attractive they will probably take other anti-competitive steps once in a position of power.
If people were free to copy ideas and products, we would make an extraordinary amount of progress in a very short time.
I would say the motivation is important. We do not live in a society where one can simply do a lot of work and see nothing for it without consequence. The problem is not originally with intellectual property, the problem is that every person has to justify their right to exist, and they do that through acquiring money by some means, which means a big chunk of what they're doing has to be concerned with acquiring money. Things like research and innovation take a lot of time.
We already have somewhat of this situation in reality. Many people involved in research a very poorly paid. Is it really resulting in better/faster research, or just people moving from academia to industry, and a lot of benefits pocketed by side actors?
> If it does, it encourages the people who I don't want to be innovating in the first place.
I.e., people who do not have lots of resources and need to figure out how to survive? You only want to see innovation from rich people with nice safety nets?
In my mind, it boils down to an extremely simple question - if money didn't exist, and you didn't have to work to stay alive, would people do job x or job y?
The answer for many jobs is yes. We know this because volunteers exist, personal projects exist, people help each other fix their roofs and cars and fridges, etc.
In a society like this, things might move a little more slowly (probably we wouldn't have the airline or public Transit systems we have now), but things would absolutely still get done.
> The answer for many jobs is yes. We know this because volunteers exist, personal projects exist, people help each other fix their roofs and cars and fridges, etc.
Volunteers and especially personal projects really strike me as activities one undertakes when they have secondary means of survival and/or safety nets. The latter is commonly mentioned as problematic in terms of requiring GitHubs from job applicants.
The existence of these people is not sufficient, we also have to prove that these people are not distributed in some highly biased way, which I suspect, they are. There could be a lot of consequence to such biases. For instance, software developers creating software that blind people can't use.
I've done personal projects precisely because I don't have another safety net.
Posting my projects here on Hacker News gets attention, which might possibly lead to a job offer. (In practice this doesn't work all the time, but it's been more successful in the past than trying to cold-email HR departments). I think personal projects show my interests and skills better than interviews.
On that note, I am looking for work, and I'll do your (2 month) project for free just to get a reference letter. The 2 month limit is because I'll be out of cash by then.
> For instance, software developers creating software that blind people can't use.
I think you'll have much better luck with such things with the hobby group. Commercial software is done by focusing on tasks that make money. Blind people are unlikely to make you money, unless you fall under regulations that will fine you for not catering for this group. Hobby software is focused on making the actual artifact, the program, better. Getting it accessible to blind users is clearly making it better.
There are places where money doesn't exist, and you don't have to work to stay alive. There are still tribes in Amazon area in Brazil who live by hunting and gathering.
I'm not sure if you find their social, cultural, and material progress sufficient for your taste.
No one is paying them to do it. That's the difference. Our society has drawn a line in the sand: if you're not getting paid for it, it's not work.
This is why people completely discount volunteering, childcare, elder care, community associations, and more when they talk about the economy. If it's not earning a profit for somebody, it's not considered work.
It's not "work" in the sense that you're not hired and told what to do. You fend for yourself, this way or another, fishing today, picking fruit tomorrow, etc.
But it of course is not living without any labor at all, Eden-style.
I mean, you're kind of framing it as a yes or no situation. It's more a question of degree.
And you could theoretically look at history before the modern concept of capitalism to see what gets done and what doesn't. I'd argue that saying we didn't have airplanes is underselling it by quite a bit - we went through how many centuries in which things barely progressed? And I'm talking things like "kids not doing quite as much".
Things progressed and changed every single century. Just not like some it happens in a tech tree in a computer game. Unfortunately history gets taught as something that is teleological, with things only having value if they bring them closer to what we consider important. So people look at multiple centuries of scholastic thought and proclaim ''well, that was a waste of time!" because it wasnt the scientific method.
I find it hard to believe that people would just band together and volunteer to build things without a monetary (or an equivalent) incentive.
Say, we're at the beginning of the neolithic age, and our village has just discovered agriculture, and the magic of iron ploughs. We already have food supply enough for 6 months.
There's just one small farm left, someone needs to go mine for iron ores, and someone needs to plough the fields, someone needs to sow the seeds.
One person 'volunteers' to do all three tasks because they couldn't agree on who'll do the mining.
The village decides to feed this guy while he does all these things, because he can't hunt while he's working. The 'volunteer' realizes that he could share part of his food with someone else in exchange for some help with iron ore mining and plough-building.
People absolutely band together and volunteer to build things without a financial or other material incentive. They do it for fun, from open-source projects to festivals like Burning Man.
The catch is, of course, that they do so after having secured the material means for that. You don't go play music just for fun is you're starving. But when you reliably are not starving, you can find resources for having fun.
You're coming at it with a framework of thinking that has already been immersed in present ideas about money. Check out, Debt: the first five thousand years. We tend to under estimate how differently people of different time periods and cultures think.
The problem with intellectual property is that it favors the sum, rather than the rate, of innovation. Companies have a natural incentive not to innovate. Since you make profit by not spending the revenue of your previous innovation on new innovation. If you want to have continuous innovation the profit should instead be based on your rate of innovation. Meaning that you don't get a monopoly on past achievements. That is how you don't have to wait decades for new cars or rockets while people with spreadsheets calculate their most opportune moment to start innovating again.
It's weird how different graphics cards are from pharmaceuticals. Both have big startup and research costs, but GPUs are basically obsolete in a couple years, they run the supply out and constantly plan to move to the next model. Pharma you can do that, or build a portfolio and collect rents for a while.
It's weird that patent durations are one sized fits all, even though how long you can capture value is completely dependent on the industry.
Where did you get that I want to only see innovation from rich people? I explain in the next sentence the type of people who I do not want in positions of power, those who take anti-competitive steps. I do not think that is at all synonymous with people who have no resources. You put those people in power and they fuck their workers.
Anyway, even with temporary monopolies, the legal system is stacked in the favor of those with money, so I don't really see how that helps people with no resources.
There's nothing wrong with people getting paid for doing good work, and nothing wrong with that work being widely available, for free, to everybody who can use it. The problem is fixation on an economic system that simply doesn't work in every situation. Information shouldn't be packaged and artificially rationed just so that it can be crammed into a market model.
Property rights are predicated on exclusion. This is especially true of intellectual property.
Todays patent wars (yes, I'm aware the present article addresses copyright) feel new, but in fact are merely echoes of earlier abuses -- Watt's stem engine patents and extension (1770s), Westinghous, Edison and lightbulbs, or Norbert Wiener's lifelong excoriation of AT&T, refeereenced in this brief video clip:
If you abolish all property rights, all social trust would eradicate. I also think intellectual property is nonsense, but you cannot easily extend that notion into all kinds of property.
We can debate what property rights we do or don't care to maintain, or how to offset their harms -- taxes on wealth, IP renewals, and the like, would likely help, for example.
The principle of private land ownership, as distinguished from either common holdings or a tenancy granted by (usually) royal charter, is fairly novel. And the distortionary consequences of rents amongst the oldest and most pernicious problems in economics.
> I know this is a controversial view, but how much progress has been lost to intellectual property in general? I do not think the temporary monopoly on an idea incentives innovation.
Why not? You're saying things that seem to fly in the face of what almost any economist thinks, that fly in the face of common sense, and that fly in the face of actually asking people why they do what they do.
From personal experience, which I know is not a great indicator, but if it holds true then it would be the society I want to live in (which biases me to the idea).
I like to build, a lot. I'm obsessive about it. I would like to build something useful, have it picked up freely, then move on to the next thing that I think would make a difference. I think a lot of innovators are like this. People like money, of course, but I think the builders would still build with no competitive protections.
Well, I'd love to live in that society too, but like you say, that's not really indicative. And remember, the question isn't just whether builders like you will build cool things. It's whether builders that build boring but marginally useful products will build them. Lots of people will still build games, but how many will still build web applications for helping perform tax audits for lawyers? Sure biologists would still do interesting work, but how many of them will personally put up the millions of dollars in funding necessary to create drugs that sightly improve some patient outcomes?
I'm not saying patents are implemented perfectly right now, or that there aren't better possible alternatives (and I think at least one of my examples is a case where things usually aren't protected by patents). But I think it's wrong to assume that innovation will happen At the same rate if you remove most of the money in it.
(and again, just look at the history here - almost all innovation for hundreds of years came from the few really privileged few who could do innovation for fun, afaict)
The same people who are investing in biotech now would be the ones investing in it then.
Inventors may do it for fun but capital needs to generate an ROI to justify its existence and in a growth obsessed global economy, scientific and technological progress leading to spending power increases is the only reliable growth mechanism. Massive underinvestmet in long term prospects and over reliance on government granted monopolies is a symptom of our IP system, not an argument for its existence.
I'm... not sure where we disagree? Except for your first and last sentences?
I mean, the whole point of granting a monopoly is to give incentives to investors to invest in biotech, so that they can reap the reward of it. You haven't explained why an investor will choose to invest in something at the same level, if they aren't able to get the same money back for it?
If a drug company didn't have a monopoly, the generics that drive down the price of the drug would be out the day after the drug, thus ruining most potential profits. Therefore, developing new drugs wouldn't be worth as much money, so less people will invest in it. You seem to completely agree with this point when you write: "Inventors may do it for fun but capital needs to generate an ROI to justify its existence and in a growth obsessed global economy, scientific and technological progress leading to spending power increases is the only reliable growth mechanism."
The whole (practical) idea of the capitalistic system in e.g. the US is to align private incentives with public incentives, so if someone develops a worthwhile drug (or e.g. writes a good book), they will be able to receive a reward for it. Just because scientific and tech progress is the only growth mechanism, doesn't give any one specific investor the incentive to invest in it (I forget the technical term for it, it's a kind of commons problem).
Again, I'm not sure I understand you, because you seem to be saying something similar, but coming to a completely different conclusion?
Ok, I was writing a reply and I got to talking about how we do not have perfect markets, we do not have infinite suppliers that would drive the profit to zero. That actually got me asking an interesting question, do we have "infinite supply"? Do we have the means to produce medicine for everyone?
This might put a finger on a weird feeling I have about the economy right now. We have a trillion dollar company that is producing easily copied electronics (their operating system is harder to replicate), we have very drugs that can be easily ripped off into generics, we have media that commands hundred plus dollar a month subscriptions that can be readily shared online. I guess the feeling that I can finally put to words is that all of this stuff is horribly mispriced.
Would there be a single initial investment? No, probably not. There would still be profit opportunity though. Innovation would be spread between more parties. Rather than one company doing huge amounts of R&D it would be many individuals making incremental improvements, to address their own needs or to address profit opportunities. It is the same with software ideas, I could tell you my most brilliant idea (give up my monopoly) but the chances that you would go and implement it are low. Not everyone is going to be producing generics, not everyone can, not everyone wants to. The profit does not go to zero, hopefully it would just go to affordable.
"but how many will still build web applications for helping perform tax audits for lawyers?"
Maybe we're better off without that software. Or maybe its useful enough that a group of IRS agents and lawyers would still be willing to pay somebody to build it, even though they don't get new "IP" out of it.
I think it would be built. Were my SO a corporate lawyer, I'd sure as hell built her software to make her life easier. At scale, there's probably always someone on this planet with some basic programming skills that's a close friend or a partner to a person in any possible occupation.
But then we might be ruling out a whole host of products, because of the incentive problems. No one person has the incentive to fund the entire development of the software, since it's prohibitively expensive. But if offered at a much lower charge, they would use it.
I mean, would you fund the development of MacOS / Windows by yourself, just so you can use it? (Keep in mind that person #2 can then free-ride on your funding and buy it practically at cost, since why not?).
Or let's take the argument to books. I assume most people wouldn't fund someone's salary for a year to write a book. But I really enjoy the end result of the fact that someone can write a book, then spread their costs on thousands of people. (I'm not too worried about the JK Rowling's of the world, btw, I'm worried about a mid-level author, not someone who is rich in our world, someone who manages to make a decent living off of a back-catalogue of dozens of stories and books. They're the ones who are usually the most hurt). You can of course extend this argument to things that cost a lot more to produce - movies, music, etc. Many things we value would not have been produced, simply because of lack of incentives (or lack of time while these people do some other job to earn money).
You can certainly think of alternative methods of funding these things, but they have their own problem. E.g. something like Patreon, which in some ways is a homage to how things were funded before modern capitalism - a rich patron would fund specific artists to produce great works.
And that's great! I love Patreon, and support numerous very deserving creators on there. But this has problems too - for one, some things are too expensive to do this way (e.g. most movies). For another, patronage gives a huge preference to things people know will work (how many people will fund drug-research to the tune of billions, with a small chance of success?). And patronage gives a preference to things people knowingly prefer - and again, we miss out on the mid-level artists of today scraping by, who can't get a large enough following, but still get some fans (and who potentially turn out to later be considered geniuses).
I'm not saying IP is perfect, and I certainly don't agree with all the things done for it (like the numerous extensions to IP which might not make sense). And our current system has issues too! We "missed" artists like Van Gogh, after all. I'm just saying that taking an un-nuanced view at this and concluding "IP is terrible, let's just get rid of it" is, in my mind, incredibly wrongheaded, at least if you believe that it won't significantly change the amount of stuff produced for the worse. You might have reasons to prefer that anyway, I suppose, but let's first understand the actual effects of throwing out IP law.
how many will still build web applications for helping perform tax audits for lawyers?
Enough. During my professional life, the software companies I worked for built business software like that, and we licensed it under A/LGPL. Much of it actually published online for everyone to use.
Instead of relying from rents based on IP, we simply got paid ahead of time to build new applications, or change existing ones. Lawyers would simply do the same if they need that software, either individually or as a group. Crowdfunding works too (even for B2B software!).
I'd be more careful about asserting that about economists. Economists are much more likely than most people to be anti-IP, and IP abolitionism is a respectable opinion among mainstream economists (see Boldrin & Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly for the most prominent example.
Now, "most economists" are not anti-IP, because most economists have never read a paper even touching on the economics of IP. And while the literature is pretty damning, it's not one of those integrated conclusions of the field that every economist gets taught in school, like the idiocy of rent control.
Interesting! How wonder how mainstream is ip abolitionism. I'm not an economist, but do read a lot of economics and haven't really run across this argument. It seems to make little sense to me, but I'd like to try and dig in to their data on this.
Basic economic theory says that monopolies lead to less innovation and poor service, so I don’t see how you could honestly claim that avoiding creating monopolies “flies in the face of what almost and economist thinks”.
Especially not if he'd looked at the economics literature on the question, which is at best tepid on the question of whether IP has a net positive effect, and at worst an outright rejection of its validity on historical, empirical, and theoretical grounds.
Basic economic theory also says that incentives matter. And that all things considered equal, if the value you can extract from a good goes down, so does the amount of that good provided. In this case, the good bring innovation.
I can only speak for my own field, cryptography, where patents have slowed the deployment of new techniques and by extension reduced the insights and feedback we can gain from real-world users. Economists' models for human behavior and their understanding of incentives do sometimes fail.
"I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers"
This is news to me. The last article I published was automatically typeset using LaTeX, following a template provided by the publisher that has not really changed in years. Hardly anyone, universities included, actually request or require printed copies; those who prefer paper copies typically print a PDF of the article they want using a generic office printer. Articles are selected for publication by volunteer reviewers, and in many cases the editors are also volunteers.
At this point there is no actual need for publishing companies, which is why the system seems like it is broken.
Publishing doesn't cost money, that's true. But the publishing companies are still filling two needs, represented by these two questions:
- 3,700 papers in my field were published last week. Which, if any, should I read?
- How's Bob's career doing? Should he get tenure? A promotion? A grant?
Under the system we have now, you should read papers in your field if they have been published in a journal you respect, and your career is a success if you're getting published in journals that your evaluators respect. If everyone self-published their own work -- which is the historical norm -- people would need to work out other methods of judging the quality of a paper than "Elsevier said this was good".
Excuse me, but this decision is not being made by the publisher. It's being made by hard working volunteer reviewers, who are typically not paid by the publisher. These reviewers are the people actually deciding what papers are accepted or rejected, and thus deciding which you read, and they deserve credit for it.
I think you mean to point out that the publishers are the abstract entities to which prestige is attached (often for historical reasons), which they certainly are. Though that's slowly starting to change, as researchers move towards open access and away from for-profit publishers.
Why would the reviewers deserve credit for the decision to honor or not honor a paper? Nobody cares or knows who they are. Nobody cares what they think. What people care about is whether the paper got published. If it was published over the objections of 80% of reviewers, nobody cares about that either. The decision to publish is made by the publisher, and that's what people care about.
> The decision to publish is made by the publisher, and that's what people care about.
I'm saying that it isn't. Modulo weird edge cases, the publisher delegates that decision to reviewers. If they choose to reject a paper, then it gets rejected.
Unless I'm really mistaken about how things work. My only first-hand experience is in PL, a field in which we publish in conferences rather than journals. I've sat in on a PC meeting where the decision to accept or reject papers was made. In cases where the reviews were clear, the paper was accepted or rejected without fanfare. For borderline papers, the decision was made through discussion among the reviewers who had reviewed that paper and the PC. I don't think the PC members were paid for it. The reviewers certainly weren't.
> Nobody cares what they think.
I care what they think. It would be really interesting and informative to have a system where paper reviews were public.
EDIT: What's your experience with publishers? Do you know more than I do?
From my perspective the main values that an modern open access publication provide are primarily emotional labor: 1) herding cats: all those reviewers and editors that are volunteering are incredibly flaky and need to be hounded by phone, in person, etc. This can't be automated because everybody ignores bots. 2) resolving disputes. hopefully the median paper goes through the process smoothly, but any dispute involving prominent researchers will require dozens of hours of careful mediation, fact-checking, and follow-up. 3) generally being a responsible institution (not suffering fraud or embezzlement, planning for change over time, etc), which is valuable because humans don't have the time or capacity to judge every piece of content from scratch and fall back on reputation. All of these tasks require competent, savy, and highly trained folks, or the whole thing falls apart. Many in the old (subscription) world would say that open access publishers have already cut corners at $3k/article, and if you read around on the internet everybody complains about how long it takes to get responses or resolve disputes, so maybe they are right.
If these numbers sound totally bogus to you, maybe you should jump in to the publishing business and undercut everybody with superior service? Try writing a business model. As to whether we need publishing at all, i'd also try convincing researchers and authors to just post their results on blogs or wikis, which have zero barriers, require no new development, etc. I think authors/researchers value the services publishers provide, even apart from the whole branding/reputation/incentives game. Even pre-print repositories involve a degree of labor to review, moderate, and resolve disputes.
"automatically typeset using LaTeX" is only a norm in a few fields, which are all relatively well resourced and tech-savy. The fact that extra typesetting labor is involved in fields that don't use LaTeX might be one reason that pre-prints have been slower to take of in fields not covered by, eg, arxiv.org.
Another class of costly labor is copy editing and getting details right. This means things like tracking down every single citation and making sure they exist and are formatted correctly, spelling corrections, making graphs color-blind accessible, etc. This is hard to automate with current tooling; a lot of time and resources are currently being spent on next-generation open source publishing/manuscript pipelines to make this sort of thing more machine-verifiable, but it's going to be a long struggle to get authors (legitimately busy and distracted and over please-do-everything-this-new-disruptive-way-please-ed) to change their established field-specific workflows.
The reason that these types of journals have not completely disrupted those fields is not that their business model is flawed (I don't think they are even for-profit), but that academics know that their future job prospects rely on the reputation of journals they have published in.
Maybe the publishing companies are doing something useful in other fields, but in my own field the only reason we bother with Springer is that they have brand recognition among university administrators. Nobody I know sees any value beyond that, and some have even complained that Springer's paid editors have reduced the quality of published articles (at one CRYPTO conference a few years ago, someone pointed out several instances where Springer had introduced spelling errors). At a few IACR members meetings people have questioned the need to bother with Springer, given that the IACR is more than capable of organizing things.
"If these numbers sound totally bogus to you, maybe you should jump in to the publishing business and undercut everybody with superior service?"
I think you misunderstood my point: I think publishing companies are completely obsolete and that we should do away with them. Once upon a time publishing companies were necessary to distribute research papers on a mass scale. Today we have the Internet, which serves that need at far lower cost and also makes it easier to organize things like peer review.
Prior to the printing press there were no scientific journals, and knowledge was spread peer-to-peer and at great expense. Things changed because of what was a new technology at the time. Now we have another new technology that is changing how scientific knowledge is spread, and scientists will have to change accordingly.
"it's going to be a long struggle to get authors...to change their established field-specific workflows."
If that is what keeps the publishing companies relevant, I would say they are a dying industry and that we should hasten their death.
> This can't be automated because everybody ignores bots
They can't ignore the fact that their work won't get published until they've finished their required number of reviews. It's easy to build in the right incentives, and review work should be part of thier professional responsibilities, and can be baked into the publishing platform they use.
> I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers
Not that much. Nature sends me paper versions of most of their journals for free (so does Blood, so do some others) for (as far as I can tell) the sole purpose of getting me to read the ads. It's fine, I suppose, but I preprint all my papers anyways (some go to Nature-brand journals, most don't), and honestly their editing isn't even playing the same sport as, say, NEJM (which really does add a lot).
Most of the time the versions on *Xiv (not just my papers, but most other authors' too) are at least as good as the ones that get published in vanity journals. Sometimes they're better, since there are times that a topic really is complicated enough to take 50 pages and 30 figures. Rarely, but still -- it's not like the same 30 figures aren't just crammed into "panels" (smaller, harder to read figures) in glamor journals (or tossed into the supplement; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t... is one of my favorite figures of all time and it's stuffed into an "Extended Data Figure" FFS!).
Chan-Zuckerberg and the Simons Foundation pay for bioRxiv and arXiv respectively, seemingly without much trouble, so I contend that publishing papers isn't actually that expensive, certainly relative to the benefit of doing so in a way that is accessible to the public who funds most of them.
I have this recurring vision since years: scientists from a far remote future or planet attempting to study the remains of our society of a few decades from now, just like many did with ancient Egypt ruins and elsewhere. This time however all their efforts fail because of DRMed documents and strong encryption, including the only still working AI computer which refuses to share any data to protect its company from liability. That would make a plot for a short film maybe.
To illustrate the problem, just think of what could have happened in the past had the Rosetta Stone been DRMed and encrypted.
> So, maybe Indiana Jones was just fighting against arcane DRMs?
Weren't the Grail trials in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade a kind of DRM to prevent people people who no license from accessing the Grail? And isn't the scene where the grail temple callapsed when Elsa tried to steal the Grail just a second layer of the Grail's physical DRM system?
I'm pretty sure companies would be happy to brick your computer for trying to access unlicensed copy of "their" data, if it wasn't for legal consequences that would follow.
> I'm pretty sure companies would be happy to brick your computer for trying to access unlicensed copy of "their" data, if it wasn't for legal consequences that would follow.
FTDI actually attempted to brick counterfeit chips via their Windows driver: See for example
Where "academic profiteering" is not profiting the academics, they were already paid by us through our governments to do the work and neither see nor expect
anything from these fees (if they did they would be going through their institution's Tech Transfer office).
This extortion is inflicted by non corporal parasites.
And sorry the costs of copying and storing bits grows smaller every day, as it has since forever.
> Unfortunately the problem is that University's promote professors based on publications.
Not just that. At some universities professors can lose their jobs if they don't get enough funding within a year.
“I am of the opinion that you are struggling to fulfil the metrics of a Professorial post at Imperial College which include maintaining established funding in a programme of research with an attributable share of research spend of £200k p.a and must now start to give serious consideration as to whether you are performing at the expected level of a Professor at Imperial College."
For profit is fine, although their APCs are much higher for OA. The trouble is that even if you do pay the APC, journals routinely screw around by delaying or "erroring" the open version to try and extort suckers. (And they wonder why we now submit our proofs directly to sci-hub...) You pays your money and... (Ask me how I know this)
It doesn't take that long to count citations, which defuses the usual excuse for using impact factor as a metric. (And some really shitty journals have surprisingly high impact factors -- they just don't publish much of anything in a given year, e.g. Science Immunology has exactly one primary research article in its entire August 2018 issue!)
Ultimately, it's funders who decide what "counts", because indirects from grants (money money money) is the only real currency. You can publish once every five years in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, but if you have a $20M P01 for those five years, you're getting promoted anyways. So when Chan-Zuckerberg or the Gates foundation says "OA or nothing", then it matters. Universities will keep licking their balls until the purse strings tighten, but once that happens, hoo-eee! It's amazing how quick them OA pubs count for promotion. (Secret: it was never the publications.)
> How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering?
As an academic, I hope that it is reasonable to claim that it is not academic profiteering; it is publisher profiteering. Academics don't see a dime from (and often spend many dimes on) the usurious fees imposed by publishers.
> I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, ....
Does it?
The authors are not paid. The referees (who do peer review) are not paid. The editors are not paid. The authors submit LaTeX, so no professional typesetters are needed. Eliminate the hard-copy printed journal, which no one reads these days, and all you are left with are the costs of hosting and maintaining a website -- which doesn't need to be at all fancy. That's dirt cheap.
Not that much human progress honestly. Most of the people who push the progress ball forward, do so not just because of access to information. They need to be in the right labs, receiving the right training, surrounded by the right mentors etc.
To be fair, they're not equivalent knowledge. Labs often imply equipment that cannot be gotten by normal means. Training and mentors know which knowledge is important, and sometimes possess knowledge that is hard to find because it's too specific and/or deep.
Research papers are a more obvious problem that is also easier to fix, but labs is nonetheless also a problem. Especially in fields where physical experiments are required, such as biology and chemistry, it's really hard to get anywhere without a lab, and running your own may be prohibitive and at times even illegal.
I do think you have a good point. What I have been telling people who wants to learn things for a few years now is to make sure they have a pipeline to test their ideas. To many people are perpetually learning, tinkering and building fantasies in their head without having the opportunity to make something out of it. I would say "to each their own" if it wasn't for the fact that it usually becomes sort of destructive. So while I do support more generous access to information it is also important that it doesn't just become "window shopping".
I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, but the system that we have now seems broken.