Today something quite significant happened.  BioMed Central was purchased by Springer publishers.  BioMed Central is a publisher that makes all its publications available on the internet FOR FREE.

This is a very important thing for science.  That everybody in the world with access to the internet or with a friend with access to the internet, can access scientific research without having to pay for it and then they can use that science in whatever way they wish, although they do have to attribute the work to the authors.

This means that knowledge is freely available.

In the bad old days, we had to purchase subscriptions to journals.   This might mean that a university had to pay tens of thousands of pounds for access to print copies of journals.  The journals made a big profit (I cannot remember any of the publishers going out of business, though I may have missed it) even though they were not the inventors and even though they didn’t write the words.

Nowadays, the author pays some money to get their paper published (about 1,000-1,500 Euro per paper) and then it is freely available to everybody on the planet.  The publishing houses have much fewer staff now - we submit papers via the internet and they simply convert the papers to pdfs with the right formatting and then the paper is available, almost immediately (it used to take months to get something in print) and it all happens semi-automatically.  The only slow part is peer-review.

In the very near future, all science will be freely-available.  This is unlike what has happened for the past several hundred years and personally, I think it is a good thing.