Well, so far those companies offered this distilled human knowledge as part of a service, with all the (unresolved) criticism associated with scraping of other peoples properties.

In this instance they did the next step, created a combined output and are celebrating themselves for the result, inviting others to join.

It's the difference of scraping all books to build a language model from it for sale to others, and outright announcing a new Harry Potter book after extending an offer to JK Rowling to join the press-release.

(and I guess I need to clarify: I don't compare scientific research to writing a novel, I compare the handling of both scenarios)