The more I reflect on my vocation--scholarly publishing--the more stunning I realize its ultimate conclusion is.

Our resources, in terms of data, are absolutely astonishing. Research, in some form, is taking place every single second somewhere in the world. Information is being produced at an unbelievable rate; experiments are being performed and refined and replicated nonstop.

This glut of information is, currently, inefficiently used. As it stands, only the minds of a few brilliant people at a time come to bear on the data of a given experiment. The authors of a paper focus their minds on this data and provide an analysis; that analysis is made available to people or organizations that are willing to provide enough money to have a subscription to a given journal.

Imagine now a future in which scholarly communication is perfect: where anyone seeking any knowledge may have it; where data is given to the person who is most capable of providing the greatest analysis of it.

There are nearly seven billion minds on Earth. Each of them possesses unbelievable processing power--capable of performing the complex calculus to determine where a ball will be, for instance, in fractions of a second.

There are not only an unfathomable number of astonishingly brilliant minds out there, but the perspective even of someone entirely unacquainted with a given subject can provide a set of fresh eyes that creates a solution to a given problem.

In a world in which information and scholarship and knowledge and data are provided freely to anyone, we will harness the massive power of humanity and solve all problems. Someone out there--out of the seven billion or so of us--can connect two dots as yet unconnected.

And between us all, if we use every human mind, we will finally connect every. last. dot.

It is toward this future that I work.