A lovely thought, [this column in the *Los Angeles Times*](https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-03-03/covid-19-open-science) pegged to the science sharing around the coronavirus:
> The prevailing model today is dominated by for-profit academic publishing houses such as Elsevier, the publisher of such high-impact journals as Cell and the Lancet, and Springer, the publisher of Nature. But it’s under assault by universities and government agencies frustrated at being forced to pay for access to research they’ve funded in the first place.
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> The critics support an “open access” model, through which research grant institutions pay fees for publication but require that their funded research be made accessible without charge.
There is, unfortunately, a conflation here: The for-profit publishing community has, of course, given OA (gold OA, at least), a bear hug—as the Plan S developments have made abundantly clear. The column is really about the speed of dissemination—with data and papers in mind. Preprints are obviously implicated, and so is the universe of green OA (where the big commercial publishers are an obvious obstacle). But kill the for-profit science publishing model? Wishful thinking.