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Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Acquires and Will Free Up Science Search Engine Meta (techcrunch.com)
tomhath quotes a report from TechCrunch: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's $45 billion philanthropy organization is making its first acquisition in order to make it easier for scientists to search, read and tie together more than 26 million science research papers. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is acquiring Meta, an AI-powered research search engine startup, and will make its tool free to all in a few months after enhancing the product. Meta's AI recognizes authors and citations between papers so it can surface the most important research instead of just what has the best SEO. It also provides free full-text access to 18,000 journals and literature sources. Meta co-founder and CEO Sam Molyneux writes that "Going forward, our intent is not to profit from Meta's data and capabilities; instead we aim to ensure they get to those who need them most, across sectors and as quickly as possible, for the benefit of the world."
The printing cost isn't what makes textbooks expensive - they're expensive because the person who writes them is typically the one teaching the course, and he can *make* his students purchase them. There are always cheaper textbooks available that they could choose. When you price a book at $9, almost all of that goes to the publisher, but if you price it at $90, more than half goes to the author (source: I looked into publishing a book on a technical topic). Textbooks are an income generator for professors.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
As an old Brit, I admire many of our Victorian philanthropists, some in this list for example: http://londonist.com/2011/10/t... who did a great deal of good.
However the modern version always seems to have some catch, supporting stock prices or products, acquiring (more) big data etc. I'm waiting for simple altruism to come back into fashion. I'll certainly be dead before that, though. All these folks could go down about about $50m and live pretty comfortably too.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Elsevier (RELX) costs around $30B total, so perhaps not. Better would be to very publicly and repeatedly proclaim that the era of closed scientific publications is over, then over a decade or so push down the value until controlling stake can be had for peanuts (relative). After that they can put it all public unless someone else has taken the step in the mean time.