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I’ve often wondered why we, the public, don’t fund more items in the scientific sphere. Basic research, for example.

At one point, there was a “Kickstarter” for science but I haven’t gotten an email from them for years.

I think that is the case, no? The majority of research is funded by the government, i.e. taxpayers' money, even more so for basic research. The better question is why we taxpayers have to pay publishers to access research funded by ourselves.

Good news! It’s been years since most government funding sources have required research they fund to be open access. The NSF has required this since 2016 and the NIH since 2008. The bad news is that journals charge incredible fees to researchers to make their articles open access and so your tax dollars go (via grants to researchers) to these publishers to fund this. Which would be fine if the prices were more reasonable but they just keep increasing.

There was a company called Petridish that did exactly this. They pivoted after six months and became Blue Apron: https://vator.tv/news/2017-09-05-when-blue-apron-was-young-t...

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