> It's more that the taxpayer is fleeced by academia in general (the whole research-funding-publishing complex) for many billions because there's no incentive f

> It's more that the taxpayer is fleeced by academia in general (the whole research-funding-publishing complex) for many billions because there's no incentive for academics to save the taxpayer money by handling publishing themselves. The scam goes further. Most of published papers are basically of no interest to nobody, or nobody except the few uberspecialists in a given field, which intend to use them as input for producing more papers of the same kind. We're paying billions to produce literally useless knowledge. In the past, there was always hope that the scientists can stumble upon breakthorughs in their work, but in today's environment, everybody has to derisk their research to stay in the game - so that's not going to happen. It's hard to tell why we do continue with a lot of research exactly. One of the arguments I heard was that the knowledge is mostly in the heads of practitioners (i.e. it's impossible to recreate state of the art based on just papers and textbooks alone), so we always want to have a few experts around in case the knowledge is needed in the future. In this model, the scientists are predominantly custodians of existing knowledge and not creators of new one.