@lain i'm glad that sci-hub and libgen exist now, but i find it really messed up indeedthe revenue system for academia is really messed up (particularly in France...) and it doesn't seem like there are much alternatives to ensuring academics get decent income without doing this "publish in journal -> get paid -> help sci-hub/libgen in pirating it" dance...
@Chimera@lain I didn't say any of that thoughResearch costs money, especially in fields like biology, chemistry, ... and without sci-hub and other methods of piracy, that'd be even more expensive as you would need to pay to look at other research too (and I'm afraid paid articles are going away anytime soon).If you don't have any "independent group" (let's pretend a state is that) financing that research, then it'll be entirely left to companies to finance research, usually for their own goals. They can decide to make that research completely private, if they want to (and they usually do, which makes sense: you put money into that, you don't want your competitors to benefit from it). It used to be royalty and nobles financing research for figuring out solutions to problems, and nobles working in research: they already had a lot of the money for it, and they knew the right people.Working a side job to finance your own independent research, depending on what you do, is often not viable. You'll also be easily very limited in what you can do and how far it can go.Not trying to advocate for "governments should finance research", "governments shouldn't finance research" or anything like that; but all of those systems clearly have limits. We are definitely spending a lot of money in doing stupid research, re-doing things that have been done 10x better before etc or financing frauds, but it's not an easy problem to tackle, I don't think it's as simple as you say it