I wish more authors would self publish. I know this isn’t about academic authors specifically, but the fact that we still rely on libraries and journals for acc

I wish more authors would self publish. I know this isn’t about academic authors specifically, but the fact that we still rely on libraries and journals for access to that makes no sense to me: I don’t understand why you couldn’t get all the benefits of peer review, publicity, access, money, and prestige simply by getting the right endorsements or having your article linked to in some sort of compilation site (a journal with links rather than the articles themselves), and just have people pay you a small fee directly for access (supplemented by donations and organizations that compile papers). The same thing should apply to non academic authors as well. The internet was built specifically for this problem, and that 402 payment required status code was introduced way back in http 1.1 -> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/402 There’s something deeply ironic about the fact that we can distribute and run fully featured modern applications on the web, but the academic papers it was originally designed for always seem to be in pdfs locked down behind paywalls. I can run powerful physics engines in the browser, but I can rarely click a link in an academic document.