On board with both of you.

Science that isn't ethical science is a huge problem we can't just wave away, and science that isn't good science is also a huge problem we can't just wave away.

On the other hand, good science that is also ethical science can be immensely useful when it helps to describe the world and predict things that could happen accurately.

I agree with the sentiment in the context of it being a file sharing site for academic texts but it's not worded so well barriers in the way of science could also include ethical concerns to certain kinds of experiment

Racial hatred and bigotry are individualistic barriers to science.

Racialized capitalism is the foundation of the modern university. Harvard resisted getting rid of its slaves and when they did they bought and sold people in the Caribbean outside of the reach of US law. Disgustingly high numbers of medical schools were built on the basis of dissecting and experimenting on black and indigenous people.

Most ivy league schools still have the remains of scores of black and indigenous people in their museums, their libraries, and even their classrooms. Entire skeletons of enslaved people were prepared for classroom demonstrations and used in contemporary memory!

The money for these universities came from the slave trade and from slave labor. The schools themselves were often built with slave labor. The patrons of the university funded race science to justify the structures of racism.

It has nothing to do with racial hatred and bigotry.

The structural racism funded the creation and expansion of universities. MIT would not exist if it weren't for the need for textile producers to build machines to make more money so the money that got poured into MIT was the money that was extracted from slave labor picking cotton.

Undoing this harm and bringing about justice through reparations is going to really undermine university endowments. It's going to require removing names of buildings, dishonoring scientific "heroes", and preventing it from happening again is going to be seen as barriers to science.

Either way, even shitty science should be freely accessible so your point doesn't make any sense.

It really shouldn't. We saw through the COVID vaccine hysteria just how harmful shitty science can be. A lot of people died completely preventable deaths because we live under the illusion that reason prevails under the free marketplace of ideas or some nonsense like that.

Can you explain what you mean about historical race science? I've never heard of it.

Basically it boils down to making up any bullshit excuses possible to justify

Race science is the science that emerged to rationalize and justify the structure of racism. It is the science that emerged to justify political race structures. Race science is what allowed black and indigenous children to be ripped away from their parents while other parents watched and participated and said "This is good".

That race science was funded by the elite or society. They extracted wealth through settler colonialism and racialized capitalism and then donated it to the universities as "philanthropy" and used their influence to direct more research into race science and other endeavors to maximize their profits.

Making research freely available is not removing all barriers to science. It is removing but one barrier to science. There are many other barriers that exist, have existed, or could exist.

In this way, saying that all barriers to science must be removed ignores the historical facts that the origins of academic science in the US are rooted almost entirely in race science. Even medical schools were locations of mass racialized atrocities where black and brown bodies were bought, imported, experimented on, killed, and desecrated in order to meet the demands of donors and chasing more endowment money. That science was used to further establish the schools' reputation and revenue streams.

Fixing this will be seen as a barrier to science, as fixing it required dismantling major portions of the socio-politico-economic structures that maintain academies of science. Reparations alone would make many scientific institutions disappear overnight.