Anurag Acharya’s problem was that the Google search bar is very smart, but also kind of dumb. As a Googler working on search 13 years ago, Acharya wanted to make search results encompass scholarly journal articles. A laudable goal, because unlike the open web, most of the raw output of scientific research was invisible—hidden behind paywalls. People might not even know it existed. “I grew up in India, and most of the time you didn’t even know if something existed. If you knew it existed, you could try to get it,” Acharya says. “‘How do I get access?’ is a second problem. If I don’t know about it, I won’t even try.”

Acharya and a colleague named Alex Verstak decided that their corner of search would break with Google tradition and look behind paywalls—showing citations and abstracts even if it couldn’t cough up an actual PDF. “It was useful even if you did not have university access. That was a deliberate decision we made,” Acharya says.

Then they hit that dumbness problem. The search bar doesn’t know what flavor of information you’re looking for. You type in “cancer;” do you want results that tell you your symptoms aren’t cancer (please), or do you want the Journal of the American Medical Association? The search bar doesn’t know.

Acharya and Verstak didn't try to teach it. Instead, they built a spinoff, a search bar separate from Google-prime that would only look for journal articles, case law, patents—hardcore primary sources. And it worked. “We showed it to Larry [Page] and he said, ‘why is this not already out?’ That’s always a positive sign,” Acharya says.

Today, even though you can’t access Scholar directly from the Google-prime page, it has become the internet’s default scientific search engine—even more than once-monopolistic Web of Science, the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed, and Scopus, owned by the giant scientific publisher Elsevier.

But most science is still paywalled. More than three quarters of published journal articles—114 million on the World Wide Web alone, by one (lowball) estimate—are only available if you are affiliated with an institution that can afford pricey subscriptions or you can swing $40-per-article fees. In the last several years, though, scientists have made strides to loosen the grip of giant science publishers. They skip over the lengthy peer review process mediated by the big journals and just … post. Review comes after. The paywall isn’t crumbling, but it might be eroding. The open science movement, with its free distribution of articles before their official publication, is a big reason.

Another reason, though, is stealthy improvement in scientific search engines like Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, and Semantic Scholar—web tools increasingly able to see around paywalls or find articles that have jumped over. Scientific publishing ain’t like book publishing or journalism. In fact, it’s a little more like music, pre-iTunes, pre-Spotify. You know, right about when everyone started using Napster.

Before World War II most scientific journals were published by small professional societies. But capitalism’s gonna capitalism. By the early 1970s the top five scientific publishers—Reed-Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, and Taylor & Francis—published about 20 percent of all journal articles. In 1996, when the transition to digital was underway and the PDF became the format of choice for journals, that number went up to 30 percent. Ten years later it was 50 percent.

Those big-five publishers became the change they wanted to see in the publishing world—by buying it. Owning over 2,500 journals (including the powerhouse Cell) and 35,000 books and references (including Gray’s Anatomy) is big, right? Well, that’s Elsevier, the largest scientific publisher in the world, which also owns ScienceDirect, the online gateway to all those journals. It owns the (pre-Google Scholar) scientific search engine Scopus. It bought Mendeley, a reference manager with social and community functions. It even owns a company that monitors mentions of scientific work on social media. “Everywhere in the research ecosystem, from submission of papers to research evaluations made based on those papers and various acts associated with them online, Elsevier is present,” says Vincent Larivière, an information scientist at the University of Montreal and author of the paper with those stats about publishing I put one paragraph back.