In an ideal system sure. Country A funds research into Subject A. Country B funds research into Subject B. Then everyone has access to everything and can work better towards Subject A+B or whatever.

I do not agree with restriction of information that has been publicly funded. It should be in the public domain for the better of humanity. It shouldn't matter who funded it, you pay it forward and maybe one day a country that had access to your countries research does something that your country can use and so the circle goes again.

Yeah, why not?

Isn't it based on tons of other research from third countries, from Indian mathematics to Newton and Leibniz that you haven't funded either?

Likely.

The benefits of making access to knowledge available openly far outweigh the benefits of keeping that knowledge behind a ridiculous pay wall that only benefits corporations who act as gate keepers to knowledge.

Why not? Aside from the obvious altruistic reasons, the cost of restricting it is probably more than the cost of not bothering to do so.

I'm ok with that. I would think of it as a charitable contribution to humankind.

I think that's appropriate for taxes. Some people pay virtually no tax, are we going to demand to see their W2's before we give them access if they want to read? If you want it to be fair we can't pretend the current system is a free market, because it's not. I don't think the public should fund things that benefit a single company - the whole point of forcing people to pay it through taxes is because it's supposed to benefit society as a whole. If that's not true, I want to stop funding it.

Sharing research is a benefit to everyone. On a pure cost basis, the US gives out billions in the form of cash all over the world. Including access to US funded research in what the US gives away would likely do more to help the US in the long term than much of the money.

I wonder if there can be a sort of research GPL. If an open paper is cited, then the paper doing the citing must also be open.

I asked a similar question a few weeks earlier.

The current system has foreign distributors receiving research papers practically for free, and reselling them for money world wide.

In many ways that is worse than freely available world wide.

it could be argued that they are mostly paying through prestige.

Don't worry. The Chinese probably have it 12 months before it's even made publicly available.