[Open-access] The Best Way to Enforce Open Access

[Coyo]

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I have no idea if this came up before, but I've found that funding is
quite the lever for enforcing certain policies. In order to eliminate
paywalls and the dominance of scientific and academic journals that
charge ridiculous amounts of money to access at all, much less own a
copy, one should eliminate government grants for research, and
substitute a system of funding that is not limited as government
grants can be, but is predicated on the assumption that the fruits of
research and academia is actually public, rather than
government-controlled.

When people refer to things like public transit, public libraries,
public universities, what people really mean is government-controlled
transit, government-controlled libraries, government-controlled
universities. From what I have begun to understand, governments tend
to feel entitled to tax money, and expect to get it, one way or
another. This means that you cannot use tax money directly as a lever
to ensure people actually have access to what their tax money has
already paid for -- research and knowledge.

In the public university model, one's tax money is used, without
asking first, to fund certain research and scientific progress, then
it is hidden away, inaccessible except for the privileged and the
initiated. A perfect example of this is the Human Genome Project,
which was paid for with tax money, public money, but only accessible
to a tiny minority of scientists and corporations. I have never seen a
single line of any of that, because paywalls demanded I pay 400 or
something like that for a single paper, when there were quite a few.

So tax money, hundreds of thousands of dollars of tax money, has
already paid for government grants and the research financed that way,
then as a university stupid, I pay hundreds of thousands of dollars
out of pocket, which also goes to the same research, then to access
the fruits of my money, I have to pay an additional few thousand
dollars once the research has already been completed. Are you starting
to see where I'm going with this?

The answer is the elimination of public universities and public
grants. Without public universities at all, with destroying the public
university system, professors and academia will no longer feel
entitled to my money, but would instead assume that if they did not
release it, the cash flow would dry up instantly, and he would be
without a job for the remainder of his short miserable life. "Public"
research belongs to the people, and was already paid for with public
grants. There should be no more money necessary for access to the
results of such research, nor should any student be forced to pay
again just to see a few stupid textbooks.

The public university system is a total failure. Education under the
public school system is a sick joke. This idea that anyone will be
able to talk faculty and academia into permitting more open access to
the research they have already completed is also a sick joke.

You will never talk academia into actually bothering to make education
possible, much less bother to educate anyone, by simply asking. If it
were, educators might actually, you know, educate, rather than charge
a few thousand dollars per credit hour. It's ridiculous. The entire
scientific community, because of their anti-scientific approach to
"peer review and open access," may as well not exist at all. It is
simply yet another waste of tax money that could go to useful things
like roads, bridges and tunnels. The power grid, at least here in the
United States, is 400 years out of date, and falling apart on top of
that. We have much better things to waste tax money on besides an
anti-scientific community.

One of the basic tenets of science is Data Sharing. To ensure that
science is conducted properly, should not only be accessible to other
scientists, but the public as well. What does "Nullus in Verba" do for
anyone if only a tiny population of buddies are the only ones who can
even access your one's research, much less have the means and
education to review it. This is not science. This is pseudo-science at
best, and anti-science at worst.

The only meaningful or effective way to enforce accessibility to the
public and the people is to withhold funds permanently unless public
access is not only permitted, but enforced. All publically-funded
research is for the public, not for some researcher to durp around and
play with his toys at the expense of the tax-payer. If you are running
on government tax money, you are a servant of the people, at least in
theory. To ensure that it isn't just in theory, government grants for
research and science should be abolished.

As an alternative, a specialized hybrid crowdfunding system can be
used to provide research based on how useful that research may prove
to be. This may be seen as a regression, but the old
science-by-commission system worked, and it kept researchers in check.
All other science, if it not accessibly, should be ignored and treated
like it never existed. Any research that cannot be accessed, even if
it is linked as a reference, is an invalid reference, and is
referencing a document that does not exist, and cannot be used as a
supporting argument for anything, because an argument that relies on a
research paper behind a paywall does not exist, either.

In addition to the crowdfunding system, a peer-2-peer loaning system
to fund research on credit can be used, however such a system is only
theoretical at this point, it has not been tested. The theory is
sound, however, and software projects implementing such a system are
already underway. If one can finance cars, get mortgages and business
loans via a peer-2-peer loan system, and then combine that with a
crowdfunding system, we can fund science with it, real science that
actually contributes meaningfully to society, not just a tiny minority
of scientists.
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