The causes of insufficient exploration volumes in Russia are analyzed. The major of them is an erroneous notion of the exploration product in market conditions. The exploration product is proposed to be defined as the totality of the exploration results (information), guaranteed subsoil use right to perform the next stage (mining), and power of assigning (selling) this right to another subsoil user (mining company). The necessity of the separate legal regulation of different types of geological information (raw, reporting, survey, and reference) and free access to reference and survey information is substantiated
