alt Hacker NewsMost 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.
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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Those 5 corporations have an achilles heel: reviewers. If the AI-driven science future has its way, the reviewers at all the major journals will collapse under the weight of submissions. The effect will be a denial-of-service, not unlike the one experienced by open source projects in the era of AI-driven pull requests.
US public libraries generally have access for everyone (at least they have everywhere I've lived), and you can walk onto a ton of campuses as a visitor to get their access.
The author is coming from astrophysics where this is not the case. The major publications are operated from learned societies or public entities (RAS in UK, AAS in the US, ESO in Europe etc ...)