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patcon • today at 9:05 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

Say what you will, but a million scientists and a network of sometimes-miscalibrated institutions (publishers, funders, universities, etc)... that feels less owned than maybe 4 companies having the edge on every [scientific?] field in the next few years...

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jujube3 • today at 9:19 PM

Most published research is controlled by 5 for-profit corporations.

  Academic publishing is predominantly controlled by a small
  oligopoly of five for-profit corporations that collectively
  publish roughly 50% of all scientific articles: Elsevier
  (owned by RELX Group), Springer Nature, Wiley (John
  Wiley & Sons), Taylor & Francis (owned by Informa PLC),
  and SAGE Publications.
It only feels "unowned" to academics because their institutions pay for access, which they can use. The general public mostly cannot.

Going forward, colleges can pay for ChatGPT and things like it, and presumably will. The AI companies will be happy to sell to them. There's really no problems here except for self-created ones (for example, if some researchers don't want to use AI). Of course, they're free to do that, just like they're free to not use computers. But then don't complain that doing stuff takes too long.

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