The Open Access Legacy of Aaron Swartz & The Chan Zuckerberg INIT Meta Acquisition

"The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced on Monday that it had agreed to acquire AI startup Meta to help 'scientists read, understand and prioritize millions of scientific papers,' but will the public have access?

According to Meta CEO Sam Molyneux, 'Each day, more than 4,000 scientific papers are published in biomedicine alone. Using current tools, most will not be read by other scientists who can learn from them.'

Meta is trying to speed up that process, so that researchers are able to learn from each other’s insights in real time, but will this research be open source and available to the public?

Right now, the acquisition is still pending shareholder and court approval, but the wording on Meta’s website seems to indicate that the technology will only be available to scientific researchers.

THE SOCIABLE APPLIES TO RESERVE ACCESS

Naturally, to find out if anyone could signup and reserve an account, this author did just that, and is now on the waiting list.

On the signup page it says, 'The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and Meta are committed to offering our tools and features for free to all researchers.'

What constitutes a researcher? Is a journalist a researcher? Will anyone with a sense of curiosity be able to access these tools?

I await confirmation or denial for my own personal access.

We are assured that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative collaboration with Meta will 'bring its technologies to the entire scientific community,' but will a member of the non-scientific community have to pay to access scholarly journals and research articles that are often funded by taxpayers?"