Project 2025 Comes Knocking
Commitment to “the cause” may soon face a test as OA money peels away
To begin, let’s reset. How much should the US government spend on making the content of scientific research articles free online to the public?
$0.00.
Such spending is actually a trap that snaps back against science, because it creates the illusion that scientific papers are for the public, which opens attack vectors for charlatans and grifters who prey on this misconception with pseudoscience.
Populist science for the attention economy.
Populism has been at the heart of access politics in the US, where OA wasn’t just “open access” but “public access.” To better infiltrate the government, SPARC and others had to reframe OA via bogus taxation math and call it “public access” — as if greedy publishers and arrogant experts were colluding to hog the benefits of taxpayer-funded research by keeping highly technical, often speculative, sometimes wrong, and definitely specialist research reports from the public.
- Yeah, read an actual paper and let me know if you feel like you’ve made some of your taxes back . . .
The government generally funds things as part of a political, social, and economic agenda that exists to give private parties various benefits and opportunities. In the growing shadow of Project 2025, science is no longer a priority, and now scientific publishers are coming into the blast zone.
It has taken longer than expected.
In 2024, with the election of a Project 2025-driven second Trump Administration, I predicted the Nelson memo was cooked. But thanks to a dysfunctional Administration that doesn’t know what it wants first — bombs, ballrooms, billions, bigotry, or basic brutality — it has taken longer than expected for that possibility to be put on the table. But now it has been, even as the expenses to fund a “public access” scheme that is at best low-yield and at worst anti-science continue to mount.