I understood that payments go to fellow uploaders, which could be random university students that just do this to "earn" tokens. So the money is still not flowing to researchers. Have I misunderstood?
It sounds like you're making a separate accusation, which I have no opinion about. There's nothing in that statement about them owning a significant part of the token supply, though it may be true for all I know. Do you have any evidence for it, or is it just your expectation of what will happen?
I am skeptical of the last part, given the legality issues involved and relatively high risk of prosecution for prolific uploaders (think of Aaron Swartz), it makes very little sense to use a traceable blockchain like Solana for this use case. This system should really be based around an established cryptocurrency that assures anonymity like Monero.
> Do you have any evidence for it, or is it just your expectation of what will happen?
As far as I'm aware that's how most tokens on Solana work. The entire token supply is created by the project owner and they decide how it gets distributed, and they usually retain a significant portion of the supply to sell in the future when a market has been established and their "monopoly money" is worth something.
You can see this if you click on various tokens at [1] and look at the "Holders" tab. There's usually a single address that owns 20-60% of the total supply, sometimes more.