Agreed.. is that like saying that researchers should do a "pay what you want for my paper" online and self publish/host the knowledge? Maybe somebody just needs to provide a standard "pay what you want" feature that academics can embed easily into their own site, and then self-publish / host.

Do you think pay to cite would be a good model?

No, not at all. Nor would models like "pay into a pool and get paid based on citations", either. That'd create perverse incentives, not least of which more incentive to push for citations to your own works when doing review.

Sure, but if you're paid based on the number of people citing your work doesn't that create the right incentives? People making more money are precisely those providing valuable information/methods to other researchers.

Sure, there's an ethics problem during reviews to push additional citations for people in your university or something but that's not too different from the current situation with grant applications, just more direct.

Hmm, that's interesting - I think maybe that's just like licensing, right? Except in this case, the licensor is the researcher/author and the licensee is the author citing the source?

Combining the two thoughts, "suggested payment to cite" with a "pay what you want" model could interesting too.

I suppose this would be a direct transfer of value from those who want to build knowledge on other people's work, to those who did the work. As long as it was not unduly expensive to do so, maybe - after all, the saying goes "paying my dues". I would think you wouldn't want to inhibit or slow down people from building on knowledge either (which is what things like Sci-Hub seem to be trying to avoid).

I wrote a few published papers some time ago, and I was told that without citations, a paper would be rejected as academic research should always be based on enhancements or references to prior work. So it seems kind of built in to the mechanism that citations are the requirement to build knowledge on top of when creating such works.

It would be interesting to see how a model like this could work. Since the value created by the researcher is essentially part of a web of value, it might be hard to determine who should get credit.

For example, we have 3 existing papers, A, B and C, and one new paper, D. Paper A cites paper B, which cites paper C - and all of them are additive to our knowledge base. Therefore, as the author of paper D, if we were to pay to cite paper A, should that also include some payment to the authors of paper B and C too?

I suppose one addition you could add to this - payment to only LIVING researcher(s)/author(s). If the researcher/author is deceased, then the payment stops. In this regard, it sounds like royalty/licensing fees.

in a way researchers paying for reading research is an absurd inflation.

Therefore, should the results of all research be made free and public? I was hoping we could allow people to pay if they wanted but also get it for free, and have both be legitimate.

Big and famous universities have deals, but not the rest, which is the reason why scihub exists in the first place. Maybe publishers should up their game and provide near free access to any PhD student or higher and a better uptime (people laughed at the fact that scihub+libgen hack was more reliable than springerlink).

Students would pay a little fee, if that doesn't impede their research too much.

Also I was thinking of a time based value. Papers / Journals older than X years, or that have already received a fair amount of fees could fall into free access. That could make students looking for alternative or forgotten ideas more motivated.