This sounds terrible. Of course there's a huge risk of it becoming made for-profit. It almost makes you wonder if the academic publishers are behind this push somehow.

Could they not have made it into some legal structure that puts universities at the top? Say, with a bunch of universities owning shares that comprise the entirety of the ownership of arXiv, but that would allow arXiv to independently raise funds?

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gucci-on-fleek 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> Of course there's a huge risk of it becoming made for-profit.

The article says that "it will become an independent nonprofit corporation", and as OpenAI's failed attempt showed, converting a non-profit to a for-profit organization is either really hard or impossible.

> Could they not have made it into some legal structure that puts universities at the top?

As a corporation (even a non-profit one), it will have a board of directors. I have no idea what their charter will look like, but I would be surprised if at least one seat wasn't reserved for a university representative, and more than that seems quite likely as well.

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MostlyStable 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

OpenAI didn't get everything that they wanted, but I very much disagree with calling it a "failed attempt". The non-profit went from owning the entirety of OpenAI to having ~25% stake.

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ronsor 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sam Altman is a special kind of person; not many could pull off the schemes he does.

	▲	gentleman11 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I doubt it was him who architected it. A team of lawful evil lawyers more likely

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cbolton 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The non-profit still controls the board doesn't it?

	▲	weedhopper 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		As shown by Altman, not really.

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gucci-on-fleek 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ah, thanks for the correction.

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mort96 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is your argument really that "OpenAI was an independent nonprofit corporation and it worked out great, Arxiv will remain just as non-profit as OpenAI"?

	▲	gucci-on-fleek 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		No, my argument is that OpenAI could make billions of dollars if they converted from a non-profit to a for-profit, and they only succeeded after years of effort and because they had already structured the company into separate for-profit and non-profit entities. And even after all this, the non-profit still controls the majority of the for-profit entity. So if OpenAI with billions of dollars only partially succeeded at converting to a for-profit business, then that suggests that organizations with fewer resources (like arXiv) have much worse odds.