Somebody has proposed eliminating NIH after its tyrannical genocide during the “virus”. The agency needs to be punished by elimination for goddamn sure. There’s no real solution for the Public “Health” torturers except elimination. We’ll never get a Nuremberg for the torturers, but we can stop paying them.
BUT: NIH also funds quite a bit of truly useful research in non-political subjects like neurology. Many of the articles I read were granted by NIH.
SOLUTION: Trinity House. A mutual benefit society for academics and hospitals and libraries who USE the research. Right now academics and libraries pay HUGE amounts of money to publishers like Elsevier and Springer who DO NOT FUND the research. The publishers don’t pay the authors. In fact they often CHARGE the authors for inclusion. Journals make massive profits by publishing, which is a nearly costless activity in the digital era. I’ve often paid $40 to those journals for an individual article that I found fascinating and useful. (Including one today!)
Right now we have two separate channels for money. NIH and NSF and other gov’t agencies grant the research but DON’T USE IT. Readers and libraries PAY money to Elsevier which DOES NOT pay for the research itself.
A Trinity House, whether you call it MBS or crowdfunding, would have a single LOOP for the money, and it would have a single profit motive on both ends. It would try to help interesting research, not just tenure grinding, to increase its subscriptions, and it would try to gain more subscriptions to help pay for the research. Better research = more subscriptions. More subscriptions = better research. Closed loop.
Polistra's Mill 