Research is the lifeblood of science, and academic journals are its circulatory system: they’re a critical mechanism for the dissemination of new knowledge. But what happens if journals place research out of reach?

That effectively is what happens when journals erect costly paywalls, argues Julia Kostova, the director of publishing at Frontiers, an academic publishing company, in an essay for TIME. Scientific journals are a big business, grossing $27 billion annually, and they have incentive to make accessing their content expensive. But as proven during the COVID-19 pandemic, when vaccine and treatment research was made freely available, there is another way.

To accelerate critical progress towards cures, journals should let down their paywalls for research into cancer and other life threatening diseases, Kostova writes. That holds especially true for research funded by taxpayer dollars; we shouldn’t have to pay to read for the research we’ve already paid for.

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