I will be looking into more about the writing of Simon Oxenham
Definitely! By the way, he's @simoxenham on Steem.
do you think that all research papers should be published for free?
I think the scientific record should be freely available under an open license. This would allow anyone to access and reuse scientific publications, datasets, and software. For science to rest on a healthy foundation, I think it's important to have these basic building blocks be open. Furthermore, most science of this category is publicly or philanthropically funded. All of the stakeholders (besides publishers looking to extract profit) want the research outputs to be open.
Now this doesn't mean that publishing is free. Of course, sometimes there are costs, although experiments like Steem show that costs don't need to be paid by paywalls. In the open access model for scholarly publishing, oftentimes the authors (usually their grants / employer) pays an APC (article processing charge) to fund the publication process enabling the resulting paper to be distributed for free. While this system has a ways to go in becoming cheaper, it creates a much better foundation for science.
@dhimmel Thanks for the information! I have been sick today but will check out @simoexnham's steemit page in a day or two. Thank you for pointing me in that direction!
I understand your point that there are costs with publishing the materials but I am glad that you think the scientific records should be made freely available under an open license. This allows people like me to better understand certain topics and the research that has been put into it! Thank you for the informative explanation! :)