Direct public funding is a horrible idea.<p>First off, it would greatly misallocate research funding. The people who&#x27;d get the most funding interest would be those who can pitch their research to the public the best, to the expense of those who&#x27;d struggle to communicate their research. You&#x27;d see AI get good funding while things like compiler or parallelization research would be rather poor, for example--even though the latter would conceivably have more immediate impact on peoples&#x27; lives.<p>The other problem is that there is a loud crowd of people who aren&#x27;t interested in objective research, but want researchers to prove their facts. The anti-vaxxers or anti-GMO people would fund study after study until they found one that &quot;proved&quot; their claims. They already do this today, but trying to move to a purely crowdfunded research model would reduce the research that provides counterexamples to avoid the implied p-hacking.<p>Research today has many problems. That most journals are pay-to-access, in my opinion, is actually among the least important. Let&#x27;s face it: very few people who aren&#x27;t researchers are going to care to actually try reading 10+ pages of dense scientific text as opposed to a journalist&#x27;s lay summary; there&#x27;s also very few disciplines were amateurs without access to research infrastructure are capable of doing publishable research (admittedly, CS and math are disciplines where an amateur can do it just about anywhere, and I suspect most commenters here are most interested in these disciplines as opposed to agronomy or microbiology).<p>Bigger problems are underreporting of negative results (e.g., we found arsenic-based life! Actually, now it looks like those results were wrong...), the desiccation of research funding, the lack of interest in &quot;fundamental&quot; research, reputational bias in grant funding and even research paper acceptance (it&#x27;s generally possible to guess which group is publishing a paper, even if it&#x27;s a blinded submission), etc. None of these are helped by crowdfunding, and, generally, they&#x27;d actually make them even worse.