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by anonuser123456 1870 days ago
>and a large portion of the population has student debt because of how expensive tuition is.

Student tuition does not fund research (at least in STEM in the US). DARPA, NSF, NIH etc. fund research. Professors at research institutions are to some extent evaluated based on the the size of their research grants.
1 comments
xNeil 1870 days ago
I was trying to point out how high tuition for universities is. I'm not sure if this is a US-specific problem, so I won't comment on that, but my point was universities receive so much money to conduct research, and then put that very research behind extremely expensive paywalls.

If what you said is correct (which I'm sure it is), it's only reduced my understanding (in a good way - thank you for your explanation). So - the government pays professors for their research, and then this very research is put behind a paywall, from which....publishers (?) make money?. I apologize, but it simply does not make sense to me, it seems extremely counter intuitive.

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anonuser123456 1870 days ago
It's a mess at every level, that is definitely true. I would say that it does not make sense from a public policy perspective. Public money does pay for the research, so the public should benefit from the knowledge.

The situation exists because it just evolved into what it currently is, and until recently no one seemed to care. Before the internet for example, it made a lot of sense for publishing to be handled by a private entity. There were real marginal costs to the production and distribution of journals and demand was relatively low.

Today this is very much changed. Demand is high and marginal costs are zero. So I imagine we will move towards an open access model.

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