Ironic, isn’t it - taxpayers money first goes towards funding a major fraction of the research, and then towards “hanging the evil hackers” to ensure the taxpaying public (the evil hackers included) never accesses what they paid for.
Disagree. While the taxpayers funded it, the taxpayers also get the benefit from others paying for it. Charging for the tech gives them information about what others find valuable, so is an important signal as to where they should spend their research time.
And the best part is that all this public money results in research papers that lie behind a private paywall. How have we allowed for this fraud to go on and on?
Someone paying you to do research and then you not giving them the results of that research is theft. Doing it to millions of taxpayers who weren't asked whether they wanted to fund you makes it exponentially worse, not better. Publicly-funded research not entering the public domain is damn near treasonous.
Remember that universities pay for the research to be created, but the researchers get to walk away and sell it. Really this is just helping turn more tax payer money into private wealth.
Simply a system with broken incentives (publish in these longstanding journals or perish), a system designed to exploit those incentives (pay us to publish in the aforementioned journals), and a group of humans who have little personal incentive to stick their necks out (e.g. grad students and professors).
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