Academic Publishing Exploitation

Siqi Chen believes the academic publishing industry is fundamentally broken and exploitative, with companies putting valuable research behind expensive paywalls while researchers receive nothing. This creates significant barriers to accessing knowledge, particularly for medical research where this information could potentially save lives.

Key Points:

• Academic publishing is an exploitative industry:

  • Publishing companies like Elsevier have "extremely high profit margins" - among the highest of publicly traded companies
  • Researchers get paid nothing for their work
  • Peer reviewers get paid nothing for their contributions
  • Universities often have to pay tuition for their researchers
  • Publishers put research behind expensive paywalls ($30,000/year)
  • Publishers add minimal value - "all they're doing is just like taking the text and copy and paste it and putting somewhere"

• This creates significant barriers to accessing knowledge:

  • Important research is locked behind auth walls and paywalls
  • Even with credentials, it's difficult to search across full-text articles
  • Existing tools like Elicit and Syspace only allow searching abstracts or uploading individual PDFs
  • There's no comprehensive solution that indexes full text of journals with user credentials

• The medical research gap is particularly problematic:

  • There's a "huge gap" between standard care and frontier research
  • For rare diseases, research is limited due to lack of critical mass
  • IP issues prevent promising treatments from being developed
  • Example: a pinworm drug from the 1970s shows promise for cancer treatment but has no clinical trials because "you can't patent a pinworm drug"
  • Research funding goes to patentable molecules even when existing drugs might work

• Personal experience with the broken system:

  • His daughter was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor
  • He's doing extensive medical research to find repurposed drugs
  • The system is "super super broken" from his firsthand experience
  • He asked Sam Altman to create a tool that would allow accessing paywalled articles with credentials

• Potential business opportunity:

  • Create a "version of deep research that lets you enter your paywall credentials"
  • Build a specialized tool like "sciencepal" for researchers
  • Focus on accessing and searching full-text academic content
  • Integrate with existing credentials and authentication systems