[mchinen]

I also think the bottleneck isn't access to the papers today and data access and silos are more important.

But I also think the GP's claim and yours are not incompatible. I wonder how much survivorship bias this has since it only considers those that are able to do research, and not those that would have but ended up doing continuing with another STEM job. We could be asking the counterfactual that I think the GP is implying: would more people have been interested in becoming cancer researchers if publications were open?

We can sort of see the effect because we have scihub now, which basically unlocks journal access for those that are comfortable with it, and I consider it plausibly having a significant effect for the population that have a research background without an academic affiliation. I've met a few biotech startup founders that switched from tech to bio and did self study+scihub outside of the university. The impetus for change I've heard a few times is a loved one got X disease, and I studied it, quit my less impactful tech job to work on bio stuff.