Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

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.

Ok, that's helpful. So commercial publishers are leading the move to open access, they give access to copyrighted content after 6 months to 2 years ("green" OA), and not sure how you define encouraging, but there's lots there - preprints & data repositories, for example.

What you're seeing is a move from using subscriptions to pay for all the scholcomm stuff to a platform services model to pay for the same stuff, but also facilitate innovation. Progress!