of non-open access publication and prices charged for many conventional journals – even for publicly funded papers – are unwarranted, unnecessary – or suboptimal – and detrimental barriers to scientific progress. Open access can save considerable amounts of financial resources, which could be used otherwise, and level the playing field for researchers in developing countries. There are substantial expenses for subscriptions, gaining access to specific studies, and for article processing charges. Paywall: The Business of Scholarship is a documentary on such issues. Another topic are the established styles of scientific communication (e.g. long text-form studies and reviews) and the scientific publishing practices – there are concerns about a "glacial pace" of conventional publishing. The use of preprint-servers to publish study-drafts early is increasing and open peer review, new tools to screen studies, and improved matching of submitted manuscripts to reviewers are among the proposals to speed up publication. Science overall and intrafield developments Studies have various kinds of metadata which can be utilized, complemented and made accessible in useful ways. OpenAlex is a free online index of over 200 million scientific documents that integrates and provides metadata such as sources, citations, author information, scientific fields and research topics. Its API and open source website can be used for metascience, scientometrics and novel tools that query this semantic web of papers. Another project under development, Scholia, uses metadata of scientific publications for various visualizations and aggregation features such as providing a simple user interface summarizing literature about a specific feature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus using Wikidata's "main subject" property. Subject-level resolutions Beyond metadata explicitly assigned to studies by humans, natural language processing and AI can be used to assign research publications to topics – one study investigating the impact of science awards used such to associate a paper's text (not just keywords) with the linguistic content of Wikipedia's scientific topics pages ("pages are created and updated by scientists and users through crowdsourcing"), creating meaningful and plausible classifications of high-fidelity scientific topics for further analysis or navigability. Growth or stagnation of science overall Metascience research is investigating the growth of science overall, using e.g. data on the number of publications in bibliographic databases. A study found segments with different growth rates appear related to phases of "economic (e.g., industrialization)" – money is considered as necessary input to the science system – "and/or political developments (e.g., Second World War)". It also confirmed a