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It did take a billionaire to kick off open science funding. Why? In part, because publishers, journals, and scientific leaders had an interest in perpetuating their broken and closed system. Typically how one gets to the top is by not rocking the boat, esp. the money-making part. https://twitter.com/tage_rai/status/1304985747380989952
I'm not saying the Arnolds don't have biases or an agenda! Everyone does. But the status quo ante in science was perverse - beholden, as it still is to some extent, to corporate publishers and their narrow interests.
Elsevier and the other top publishers' resources for advancing their interest in locking up papers and data in their silos dwarf the ~$100 million given by the Arnold Foundation in their Research Integrity grants.
Case in point: lobbying politicians to keep knowledge locked up.
Elsevier paid Representative Daryll Issa to introduce the Research Works Act to roll back the NIH open access mandate. https://theconversation.com/push-to-block-free-access-to-academic-research-falters-in-the-us-5387
And it continues: https://twitter.com/brembs/status/1304426176472117249
Elsevier paid Representative Daryll Issa to introduce the Research Works Act to roll back the NIH open access mandate. https://theconversation.com/push-to-block-free-access-to-academic-research-falters-in-the-us-5387
And it continues: https://twitter.com/brembs/status/1304426176472117249
(Disclosure: I have never received funding from Arnold or any other billionaire. I do have a history of biting the hand that publishes me http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs-228-william-gunn-and-alex-holcombe-on-is-elsevier-helping.html )
The other thing is, how do you expect public goods like the Open Science Framework site and its servers to get funded? The market system that historically paid for 99% of scientific journals cannot provide public goods, it needs to capture goods (research) to make money.
Traditionally, government and private patrons funded public goods such as science. But due to corporate capture, government could only fund the public funding of science publishing to only a small extent.
Look up the history of PubMed. It was supposed to be much bigger and broader. What happened? Publishers said, that's our territory, where we make profits.
