Throughout history, academia has typically been for the rich and the rich only. If you didn't have money, you wouldn't have enough free time to explore the mysteries of the world. In more recent times, if you didn't have money, you weren't able to get into higher education, or join scientific groups. Nowadays, however, the major issue comes with the monetization of research and news to the point where regular people cannot access them.
While some news organizations provide free news, others require a subscription. The Washington Post, which has the famous tagline of "Democracy dies in darkness" regularly puts articles behind paywalls. When we expand to research journals, we can see that many of them also require subscriptions to view published studies.
From what I've seen and been told, this money doesn't go to the researchers themselves, it goes to the journal. And while I understand that there are employees in journals and they require payment for their services, I do wonder whether there is a way for us to decrease the costs of viewing academic research. In the age of the internet, using ads that pop up on the sides of studies might be a possibility? Or suggesting donations to continue the good work?
Physical copies I can understand requiring payment but thinking about the sheer cost of be able to access research and news makes my head spin. I'm in college and my university gives me access to a lot of journals for free, but that only lasts as long as I go here, which is also expensive. I've had professors who have required reading on sites that need money to view an article, and that seems like a lost topic within academia.
Subjugating people to immense amounts of fees and fines in order to be involved in academia (or even to do their own personal research to better their lives) is unfairly classist and forces us to miss a huge perspective on research. One of the reasons that I started this blog was to showcase research which most people wouldn't be able to afford to ever read, and it opened my eyes even more to the implied division of those who have money and those who don't.
If I attempted to get a subscription to every journal my school gives me access to, I'd be spending hundreds of dollars every year. And that's only if I do the ones which I currently have access to. Not even that is all encompassing. I don't have a full solution, but we cannot expect people to be well educated and research claims made by others while doing so much to stifle that ability.
Knowledge should be for knowledge's sake, not because it has a price tag assigned to it.