Open Access is free, immediate, online, availability of research articles with full reuse rights. This is about, first of all, making all this content available for anyone wherever they are in the world to read and access and build upon so people can do interesting things and work in new ways with the material to really make the research literature much more valuable. The history of the model is really publishing scientific, manual scripts, especially ones with complex, detailed color figures, was expensive. And so if you wanted your article distributed broadly and widely, you sent it to one of these journals and then they would manage the review process and the communications with reviewers and revisions and eventually something would be accepted in they handled the type setting and the printing and the distribution of your scientific work. And it worked great. It science progressed pretty well and it became a good way to distribute scientific papers. And what's changed is really two things in essence. First is digitization. You can now do everything electronically instead of printing it. And the second is that the journals started ratcheting up the price of subscriptions to many of their journals. And so those two things came sort of to a head where it's become almost the theater of the absurd with the amount that some journals want, libraries to pay to subscribe to the journal. Research has shown that journal prices have actually outpaced inflation by over 250% over the past 30 years. They're over 15 entire academic disciplines where the average price for one journal is over $1,000 for one subscription for one year. Yeah, in chemistry, the average title is $4,227 and physics $3,649. And it even goes down into like agriculture is still over 1,000 and geology and botany all over 1,000. And those are just the averages. There's like the way out there. There's a journal called Ketcher Heatrin that's $40,000. The journals aren't producing the material. The journals don't employ the people who write the papers. They don't even employ the people who review the papers. And it doesn't make a lot of sense in terms of what science is supposed to be about. It's supposed to be about discovering new things and spreading that knowledge around. It's so irrational to think that these scientists like me are paid by the government to do research and to discover things and distribute that. And then, you know, two years of work by 20 people is going to be compressed into a paper and then not made available to people. It just doesn't make any sense. Yeah, so I think this problem of access to research is one that people run into all the time. But it's not one that they sort of realize. I know when I was a student, whenever I would be doing research and come across a great abstract and not have access to it, I just sort of moved on and thought, you know, well, this is the way it is. There's, you know, I didn't really realize that there was a system behind this. You know, that was causing me to not have access. And I think students' educations literally depend on access to the journal literature. I mean, professors can only teach what they have access to. If you look at less wealthy countries, like low and middle income countries, they're really, really struggle to get access. And, you know, so that's a real impediment that prevents researchers in those countries from being able to contribute fully or do world class research. I mean, I was not even with this lack of access and even with my brother starting the public library of science, I wasn't convinced. I didn't understand why this was a big deal. And then we had a family medical emergency and I was up at three in the middle of the night in a hospital next to my wife in the hospital room, surfing the web on the crappy hospital wireless internet. And I was trying to find out information about a particular medical treatment and I couldn't get access to the damn papers. And our doctors didn't know the answer to these particular questions. And we needed to decide about what to do with this medical treatment. And here I was a trained scientist with the ability to read and interpret and understand many of these papers. And I couldn't get them. And I just, that was the moment for me. I was like, you've got to be kidding me. Here's the, what the problem comes down to in most cases. And it gets in the hospital room, I paid. I bought dozens of articles. The problem is that you don't know which article is relevant until after you pay for it. The abstracts don't always make it clear what is contained in the paper. So there was no return policy, right? I couldn't buy it and then say, this is wrong. I'm giving it back. So now you're going to spend $1,200 to just find out if possibly they're relevant. I mean, if you do that every day, you're in a big hole. It's not, I'm not, you know, some communist saying everything should be free. And, you know, I don't believe in corporations. Nobody is saying that publishing is free. What people are saying is that we need to work on models where the government that is already paying for the research and is then paying for the subscriptions and is then paying for the indirect costs for the libraries. I mean, in the end, taxpayers and the government are paying for this. So why can't we do it in a way where the knowledge is distributed broadly as opposed to the knowledge is restricted? So there are two components of open access. The first is that articles are available for free to read so that you don't hit that paywall when you click to read the full tax. The second part of the definition that's every bit as important is that the articles come with full reuse rights so that scientists and researchers can build an entire new tier of tools on top of the research literature. And those new tools can interact with these articles, right? They can mind the articles. They can find relationships. You know, they can find snippets of genetic code that are mentioned in multiple papers or different phrases or concepts that are referenced in a biology paper and a chemistry paper. You know, that individual researchers would never be able to uncover because they can't read this many articles. So if you actually wanted to do that, you couldn't because you would have to negotiate individual rights with every single publisher in order to do that. In an open access world, all this information would be open on the internet for free and people would have unrestricted rights, you know, to do that kind of data mining. I think the main impediment is the incredibly slow movement of scientific cultural practices. I mean, I think, you know, scientists, despite being great explorers in terms of knowledge are sort of very conservative in terms of changing their practices. Lots of the community says, oh, yeah, I support openness, but I want a nature paper. That sort of reliance upon, you know, impact factor and the name of the journal does allow some journals to not respond to the community pressure towards openness. The scientific publishing model that we have now, there's no evidence that it is optimal. We need to experiment with all sorts of different scientific publishing systems. Corporations may figure that out before governments do. I'm very open to whoever is going to come up with creative solutions to these issues. I view it much more as scientists and scientific publishers are slow to change. Some of them are going to be left in the dirt because openness is clearly the future and the creative ones are going to survive. It's really important. They graduate students, you know, start these conversations with the research teams, their PIs, you know, just let them know that it's something that they care about. And, you know, there's a real benefit to researchers, to graduate students by doing this, right? Because the more people that see your work, the more people can build upon it, then they'll say you. It's not just good for the person that can read your paper. It's also good for you. I believe that scientific knowledge spreads and increases best if there are no restrictions on access to the knowledge that has been generated in other places. I want the discovery of new scientific knowledge to happen faster. And openness helps accelerate that. Even if for your own reasons you need to publish in a subscription journal, there is this other option that even if you don't publish in an open access journal that you can still make, you know, the text of the article itself freely available so that people can at least read it and get access to it.