The problem is greed. Authors of scientific journals get nothing, ever, for writing their articles. IF they are well-connected, say they’ve been to parties at NIH, well, then the more they publish, the more they’re paid. Unfortunately, the people who make real breakthroughs, basically me, ‘those people’ find that having all journals accessible to computer search makes them far more valuable than any paper journal ever could be. NIH and Pub med stop at the abstract. That’s incredibly useful, but to be able to, say elucidate atherosclerosis, one has to live in Bethesda. Less than 3% of the articles and books at the National Library of Medicine (which is actually buried in a deep hole) is accessible over the web. Thus the trek to Maryland necessary for any serious ferreting out of facts to follow the lines of logic that develop. THEN THEY KEEP THE HOLE CLOSED UP AND GUARDED MOST OF THE TIME. Talk about ineptitude. If genius needs access to the library, then the library should open. People like me only come along every few hundred years, you know.
Most of you people aren’t like me, you’re much less bright, you live useless lives and you will leave nothing of substance behind you except the stuff you leave in the world’s toilets. You are worker bees. You need somebody like me to figure all the hard questions out so you can quit your day jobs and do something useful with your mundane lives.
You have to love science enough to see it promulgated properly. Right now things are just awful. Of course, it is much better than in Leonardo’s day, so I’ve been able to figure most human disease out. Google a booksearch on ‘Nicholson AND Of Love’.
The national library of medicine should be open 24 hours, so should the Library of Congress. Put on night shifts. The extra cost is nothing to what is lost by the current sloth. I could have saved a trillion lives with open free-access libraries. I’ve figured out how to end criminal behavior, for instance. Of course, I’ve had to go up there to Bethesda several times and hunker down, I’ve gotten horribly sick every time I go, too. All that is unnecessary, or should be, if only the public (i.e. at the least the great geniuses of the world like me) can be allowed to see everything and search everything all at once, with inclusive searches and decent search engines. Thank God for Google, lighting the pathway. Our government should facilitate the combination of all knowledge into wisdom–greater by far than the sum of its parts.
So arrest the publishers who want to charge to let people see research papers. Let them advertise, but don’t let them restrict access just to line their own stingy pockets at the vastly greater expense to the rest of humanity.