Hmm, that's interesting - I think maybe that's just like licensing, right? Except in this case, the licensor is the researcher/author and the licensee is the a

Hmm, that's interesting - I think maybe that's just like licensing, right? Except in this case, the licensor is the researcher/author and the licensee is the author citing the source? Combining the two thoughts, "suggested payment to cite" with a "pay what you want" model could interesting too. I suppose this would be a direct transfer of value from those who want to build knowledge on other people's work, to those who did the work. As long as it was not unduly expensive to do so, maybe - after all, the saying goes "paying my dues". I would think you wouldn't want to inhibit or slow down people from building on knowledge either (which is what things like Sci-Hub seem to be trying to avoid). I wrote a few published papers some time ago, and I was told that without citations, a paper would be rejected as academic research should always be based on enhancements or references to prior work. So it seems kind of built in to the mechanism that citations are the requirement to build knowledge on top of when creating such works. It would be interesting to see how a model like this could work. Since the value created by the researcher is essentially part of a web of value, it might be hard to determine who should get credit. For example, we have 3 existing papers, A, B and C, and one new paper, D. Paper A cites paper B, which cites paper C - and all of them are additive to our knowledge base. Therefore, as the author of paper D, if we were to pay to cite paper A, should that also include some payment to the authors of paper B and C too? I suppose one addition you could add to this - payment to only LIVING researcher(s)/author(s). If the researcher/author is deceased, then the payment stops. In this regard, it sounds like royalty/licensing fees.