Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

On this point, it's not the research that's the intellectual property of Elsevier, it's the published article in which the research is described. OA business at Elsevier grew 25% last year, so the world we both want is coming.

Guess who is responsible for the growing influx of VC into the formerly sleepy sector? It's the commercial publishers, as they transition to information & analytics businesses, making acquisitions of startups & giving VCs a reason to invest.

I’m sure many of them would love to see the free dissemination of all extant public research — the start-up boom that would follow would probably define the decade

No published research is inaccessible today, even the subscription stuff. Libraries are allowed to give free access to anyone who walks in, researchers can give their papers to anyone who asks, then there's all the pirate stuff. Developing countries are given free access.

It’s a search problem. The difference between library-card access to a handful of PDFs at a time & an open, universal API for public research is *massive.* The opportunity that’s currently being squandered is unreal.

This I mostly agree with, but there are lots of free search indexes already.

I'm trying to to understand what you understand and what you don't. Is there a thing that you can imagine seeing that would compel you to believe publishers aren't the ones standing in the way?

Totally! That they don’t pursue copyright ownership, don’t enforce the copyrights they own now, and encourage proliferation of results, data and records in the public domain.