Apple recently posted a quarterly earning of $51.5 billion, bringing its yearly haul to $234 billion, a startling growth of 28% over last year’s earning. This remarkable success has been enjoyed widely in the past year by the tech sector with Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Intel stocks skyrocketing. While the tech sector has surged, the biotech and medical sectors have languished with the Nasdaq Biotech, S&P Health Care, and S&P 500 Health Care Facilities indexes all encountering steep declines.

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By the far the most insurmountable barrier toward scientific progress is scientific paywalls, user fees where the reader of a journal article must pay 35 dollars to read the article, which are nearly unavoidable since 90% of all journals are locked tightly behind them. These fees greatly increase the cost of doing scientific research, exacerbating recent research funding cuts, while also creating a tier-based model for the dissemination of scientific knowledge.

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