I seriously believe that this -- the fact that you need access to a university library, a research grant, or several thousand dollars worth of discretionary inc

I seriously believe that this -- the fact that you need access to a university library, a research grant, or several thousand dollars worth of discretionary income just to read the primary source materials of the last 70 years of science -- is the reason why so much of the planet is scientifically illiterate. We ask why the hilarious notion that science is just a species of religion -- a collection of essentially arbitrary dogmas handed down by priests in white coats -- has taken such hold among the populace. But, really, what does the public see of modern science but dogma? The state of the art -- the debate, the argument, the statistical calculations, the brilliant conclusions, the idiotic conclusions, even the raw data itself -- is all locked up behind paywalls and private conferences and university tuitions. 99.5% of the world never sees actual science being done. At best, they do toy science in their classrooms and read prepackaged science-flavored PR in their magazines. The best the public can hope for is a bunch of documentaries and popularizations, some of which are great. But nearly all of them are second-hand, many of them contain major omissions, mistakes, or distortions, and they feel constrained by their need to maintain their mass audience of businesspeople on planes -- they tend to not publish graphs or, god help us, equations. Of course, most of the public wouldn't understand Nature even if it became free and open tomorrow. Many of the papers are written in barely-comprehensible jargon. But that's not a coincidence; it's a side effect of allowing journals to evolve into niche publications for a handful of graduate students. Perhaps, in the world where scientific publications are available to anyone to read, journals will slowly evolve toward a standard of writing that allows interested fans to follow along. Or a genre of annotated journal articles might arise.