“Our entire epistemology of science and research relies on the chain of footnotes,” explains author Martin Eve, a researcher in literature, technology and publishing at Birkbeck, University of London. “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.”

Isn’t this the natural state of things for the unprivileged majority of us that in the reality of publisher paywalls do not have access to the riches of Anglo-American research centres? Apparently Eve doesn’t know that libraries in the most of the world still struggle with paying fees to Springer. As a consequence, researchers in affiliated institutions do not have access to the corresponding published content.