The Gates Foundation incidentally is one of the strongest voices in the push for Open Access. As a large and influential scientific funder, they were one of the first to demand research they funded to be OA, and recently one of the first non-founding parties to sign up for the strongest push for OA so far: Plan S.
Unfortunately, it's not a problem you can solve just by throwing money at it. It's primarily an incentive problem, and the only influence the Gates Foundation has on that is through its funding of research. In that regard, it's doing very well.
Github could be crucial in helping to win this war. The problem is not only that journals are behind paywalls (luckily sci-hub is helping here) but also the format we use for publishing and review is from last century. Github could help to make it easier to share articles with the code and data used to obtain it, and to have better process of peer review.
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This is a war every philanthropist should be waging.
Calling Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and all others : please make science Free, Forever, For Everybody.
There's no bigger creator of human development opportunities than free science (imho).
More than a decade? ago, Bill Gates freed the Feynman lectures, only to lock it in Microsoft's Adobe Flash-competing technology, silverlight.
Now do it properly : make it free as in beer and free as in freedom. Yes Bill, you pay everything, we nothing.
The Gates Foundation incidentally is one of the strongest voices in the push for Open Access. As a large and influential scientific funder, they were one of the first to demand research they funded to be OA, and recently one of the first non-founding parties to sign up for the strongest push for OA so far: Plan S.
Unfortunately, it's not a problem you can solve just by throwing money at it. It's primarily an incentive problem, and the only influence the Gates Foundation has on that is through its funding of research. In that regard, it's doing very well.
Github could be crucial in helping to win this war. The problem is not only that journals are behind paywalls (luckily sci-hub is helping here) but also the format we use for publishing and review is from last century. Github could help to make it easier to share articles with the code and data used to obtain it, and to have better process of peer review.