At work we're starting a project that can literally reduce deaths (if it goes well, if people use it etc). It's a well studied field but half the papers are behind paywalls for journals we don't pay for. We pay for some of these journals but not all. I recognize people may not have a lot of sympathy in this case since my employer can just pay, but for, say, small startups trying to build on top of research these paywalls can be detrimental. In some cases crippling. I legitimately feel it slows the pace of human innovation: what's the point of doing research if only other researchers can view it? Don't you need industry to also build on top of the research? Sometimes people complain that if public money paid for the research then it should be freely available. I think that's only a partial solution. While researchers are judged by which journals they get their research into this will stay a problem. We need to develop alternative ways of measuring research significance divorced for big name journals.
