Having done a short stint dealing with this stuff I am glad something is being done. NIST/NSF funded several studies that I was close to that were suddenly owned by a journal who did nothing but provide a place to put it.
Public money should always mean public access. Not just for journals, but for anything. If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continues.
I agree. All that data should be publically available for reproduction of the work as well as open season. No one should be able to patent it either, or should only be able to file a patent to make it "publically available into perpetuity" to protect it. If tax dollars funded it, we own it as a society. If companies foot the bill then maybe something more complicated needs to exist, but if it is 100% public funded, universities should not be able to sell it off to corps.
That's the system we had in the 1970s (government owned the patent to government-funded research). And what happened is that the government didn't know what to do with the patents, and the inventors, who were best positioned to commercialize their invention, could not justify spending time and money to commercialize something that they didn't own. So the Bayh Dole act of 1980 allowed universities to commercialize their federally funded inventions. The result was an explosion of startups, especially in the biotech industry.
Example: John Adler received some government funding to develop Cyberknife (image-guided radiation therapy). But he couldn't get follow up funding to commercialize this revolutionary new technology. So he took out a second mortgage on his house to commercialize the invention. And now image-guided radiation therapy is a standard treatment for many types of cancer. There's no way he would have taken out that large personal loan, if he didn't own the intellectual property.
There's a large gap between a patent, and a commercially viable product. And if you showed the patent to "experts" in the field, they would likely tell you that it's worthless. Great ideas are only obvious in retrospect. The inventor has the vision, motivation, and knowledge to make their invention a reality, but they can't quit their job and get external funding, if they can't own their invention.
The research results should not be patentable. If someone wants to then productize the research, they can patent any methods they can independently come up with, as long as they didn't use public money for that as well.
That is plenty of latitude for seeding start-ups and commercializing technology. There is no need to lock up the actual research so that only the researcher and their university can commercialize it, protected from competition. It does a disservice to the people who's money paid for the research behind it.
> If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continues.
I wouldn't go this far. Part of the current revolution in the private space industry is precisely allowing companies to own products that were partially funded by taxpayer dollars. As it encourages companies to fund their own money into it, rather than simply relying 100% on government funding.
Further if the government wants to encourage some industry, by using tax dollars to fund it they would instead destroy that industry. Many companies would end up simply refusing government grants because they know they could never profitably sell it if it would simply be copied. Or they would charge the government significantly more for the product.
Now yes, if the research is done at federal centers that simply exist for research rather than creating products, yes absolutely put it out for free immediately, so that it can get into products faster.
I'm pretty sure the US doesn't need a revolution in the federal government subsidizing private business ventures. We've got more than enough of that already. The idea of federal funding being verboten in the corporate world is more akin to an ideal state, rather than one to be avoided.
The DoE didn’t free that tech to the public, the US government’s using licensing to actively prevent American companies from competing with the Chinese one they allowed a sublicense to be granted to (from your link):
> Forever Energy, a Bellevue, Wash., based company, is one of several U.S. companies that have been trying to get a license from the Department of Energy to make the batteries. Joanne Skievaski, Forever Energy's chief financial officer, has been trying to get hold of a license for more than a year and called the department's decision to allow foreign manufacturing "mind boggling."
Now they are removing the 12-month post-publication embargo period for peer-reviewed manuscripts that result from federally funded scientific research. So, 12 months sooner.
I meant with regard to the ability for anyone to use it without, say, violating patents. Plenty of drugs discovered and developed with NIH money go on to be patented by private companies.
I take your point, but OTOH it's difficult to envision a world where drugs actually get brought to market without patent protection. The amount of money and risk involved is just astronomical.
I'd be happy funding drug development, clinical trials, etc with public funds, as well. I also believe there are opportunities for companies to profit without being given exclusive manufacturing rights via patents.
It's the other way around -- academic R&D is just about the only type of government spending for which there's wide-spread support for openness and a lack of entrenched power against openness.
The USG spent $6B on cloud computing in 2020. That number is increasing quickly. To say nothing of the massive quantities of non-OSS software that the government buys and incorporates into is own business-critical processes. And it's not just government licenses, but also anyone who interacts with the government. E.g., try interacting with any government agency without an Office 365 license.
You get really funny looks if you say that MSFT should have to give away Office 365 for free if the government is going to use it for anything.
But total USG spend on closed-source software has to be well into the 30B-50B range conservatively. For reference, the entire NSF budget is $10B.
The main reason for this is that there are many monied and powerful stakeholders who benefit from selling closed software to USG, whereas the academic publishers a tiny, often not even American-owned, and got super greedy and screwed their natural contingency (academics hate them as much as or more than anyone else).
I'm not sure the difference is as cut and dry as you're making it out to be. A big organization doesn't just pay Microsoft a zillion dollars for a million Office licenses and then never talk to them again. There's an ongoing support relationship, which for large enough customers might include things like developing features on request.
Most of what the big contractors like Booz do is custom software. Every single cloud provider has an entire GovCloud division. Even Office has special Government licensing that behaves differently on the backend.
I think part of the point here, is that the value from that investment should go to the investors, who are (if you buy the 'by the people, for the people' hype) the taxpayers.
Say I'm vulture capitalist Tom, and I pay a few gajillion dollars to developer Gupta to create a product for me. I would be understandably pissed if Gupta turned around and sold that same product to competitor vc Janet. She didn't pay for that dev work, I did.
1. There isn't as much of a difference here as you think. Contractors do turn around and use components developed in public contracts for other consulting projects. Most commonly with other sovereigns, especially when the original contract was with a city or state, but sometimes at the national level as well.
2. With respect to R&D, one big difference is that the government doesn't provide seed funding. They provide grants. If the government wanted equity in research labs, they'd have to pay a lot more. You'll see this in practice if you ever have the extreme displeasure of doing non-useless research in academia. Companies that insist on IP ownership/sharing end up paying much higher premiums for university research contracts. Repealing Bayh-Dole would have no effect on the accessibility of actually useful research; universities and companies would privately fund the useful stuff and leave the government to fund the labs of politically-connected/twitter-famous but otherwise totally useless academics.
(To be clear: we're on the same side here with respect to open access publications.)
Thanks for the well informed response! I had not yet heard of Bayh-Dole and you gave me some good googlin'.
In regards to your explanation in [2], that sucks - I kinda figured that's how things were but I sorta went around academia rather than through it so it's interesting to hear. Any hot ideas about how it could be fixed?
1. replace the current academic funding model with pure fellowships. Each individual, from most junior to most senior, gets their own N year funding.
2. Each has a legal entity under which their IP lives and in which the government takes a small, fair, non-voting share.
3. Completely divorce this funding infrastructure from universities -- if someone wants to use part of their grant to pay for PhD courses/advising, great, but make it so that funding science is not contingent on that institutional apparatus.
The usg, for whatever that piece of software says on the tin. Unless you are just asking if there is any closed source software anywhere which provides value not totally replicable using oss, which seems like a silly question.
I don't think military R&D produces many academic papers, but anything going in a journal a foreign national can just buy should probably also be made available to the tax payer.
DARPA is probably the best-known route and funds a lot of academic and corporate research (including, for a while, me).
The DoD also has a bunch of other grant-making programs (Office of Naval Research, Congressionally-directed Medical Research Program, etc) and also labs that directly do research themselves. The Air Force has a big research center (AFRL) in Ohio; the army has one in Maryland (ARL), and the Navy has one in DC (NRL). There are loads of other sites as well: the army has a night vision research lab in New Jersey, for example, and the Navy has some marine mammal stuff on the West Coast.
A lot of this work--even the stuff done at DoD labs--winds up in open literature. By policy all of that is supposed to be publicly available, so you can browse it here https://discover.dtic.mil/products-services/.
I'm not referring to military funded research, I'm referring to military R&D as an academic discipline, in the same way one would refer to something like medical research.
> I don't think military R&D produces many academic papers
Do you mean researchers employed by the military? Otherwise, basically half of every STEM professor I encountered had funding via some branch of the military.
"public access to federally funded research results and data should be maximized in a manner that protects confidentiality, privacy, business confidential information, and security, avoids negative impact on intellectual property rights, innovation, program and operational improvements, and U.S. competitiveness, and preserves the balance between the relative value of long-term preservation and access and the associated cost and administrative burden"
we do through the international patent system. We should get money back for our tax dollars, simple as that. We could work it into international patents. I know some countries ignore those, but we can make them pay in other ways like tariffs and treaties.
Not to be that guy, but other countries don't pay tarrifs, Americans do. The tarrif is levied on the importer, who then passes that cost on to the consumer.
The tarrif is not paid by the exporter.
The goal of a tariff is to _increase_ the customer price for some good locally, and thus make a local (more expensive) good more compeditive.
A foreign country may experience lower demand for their product, but its not like they "pay any money".
Yes, lower demand may lead to a lower price, or it may mean they export to other countries instead.
I was thinking nationally but honestly there's nothing constitutionally that would prevent a non-citizen from accessing the research. I guess, aside from military/encryption research of course.
I see no problem with publicly funded stuff being available world-wide. But given the choice between nothing or taxpayer only, the taxpayer should get first dibs.
Although I am generally supportive of research products (data, papers, reagents) being broadly open, I think there is the possibility of a perverse incentive to free-ride on the scientific funding of other nations. As the velocity of information (i.e., faster spread) and international mobility of academics increases, the perverse incentive goes up.
That's not a perverse incentive. It's the entire purpose of academic research. The results of the research are supposed to benefit the entire humanity, not just the entity that happened to fund it. Funders in turn have a range of motives. Some are idealistic and fund research because it's morally the right thing to do. Others are more utilitarian and believe that there are indirect benefits from having academic researchers in the society.
We should be able to use the international patent system for that. Make it publically open to any single "citizen" any international corp seizing on it should have to pay patent fees to the general fund of the US treasury or something set up to feed it back into our government sponsored R&D programs.
Imagine if a VC putting in "one red cent" meant that the founders and employees in a new company couldn't capture any of the returns themselves...
Why should the government be different than other investors here? Putting in money != doing the work. You have to have the funding, but you also have to have the work, and money alone doesn't guarantee success.
Your analogy fails because it's not the people doing work in science that are capturing the returns. It's a bunch of rent-seeking publishers whose entire business model is extortion.
This is more like if a VC funded you, but Google said they wouldn't render your page in Chrome unless people paid them for access, and also you aren't allowed to take payment.
> If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free.
This logic only works for easily-replicable goods, like information. It falls apart when you consider various goods and service that are not easily replicable, or where increased demand can mean increased funding is necessary. E.g.:
* So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?
* No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?
* No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow
* Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
The infrastructure isn't paid for when it's built (including the public house). It's financed on debt. Pay-by-use is just a form of tax payment.
It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage.
If the road was already completely paid for by tax-payers (no debt), and then a toll company wanted to operate the road for a 99% margin - you'd see a lot more people complaining about that.
Street parking is an interesting example in that the demand charge is probably unrelated to the underlying cost. However, it's just one of the many examples of taking tax dollars from Pot A to pay for things in Pot B.
> The infrastructure isn't paid for when it's built (including the public house). It's financed on debt. Pay-by-use is just a form of tax payment.
Sorry, I don't understand the relevance here.
> It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage.
Exactly. It's easy to provide the information to essentially infinite people for free, and there's no real downside to doing so.
> If the road was already completely paid for by tax-payers (no debt), and then a toll company wanted to operate the road for a 99% margin - you'd see a lot more people complaining about that.
For sure. Of course, real world charges for roads/parking is a little more complicated than that.
> Street parking is an interesting example in that the demand charge is probably unrelated to the underlying cost. However, it's just one of the many examples of taking tax dollars from Pot A to pay for things in Pot B.
Yeah, the most obvious reason to do this for street parking is because you actively want to manage demand of a highly demanded, finite resource. You don't really need the money, but charging gets you other changes you want. Ditto for congestion charges.
There's no legitimate downside to doing so. There is a very real illegitimate downside for copyright racketeers such as Elsevier, in that they would be much less able to engage in said racketeering.
I see no reason why the answer shouldn't be "yes" to each of those bullets. I don't think the logic falls apart. Public goods and services should be public goods and services, full stop.
One reason to put tolls on roads is to make the people who use the infrastructure also the people who pay for it's maintenance and improvements. Public goods are provided by public money, and in some cases it might be fairer to get some/most/all of that public money from the portion of the public that are using the thing.
Also as a disincentive to use something. Like we want people to drive less in the urban core to reduce congestion and also the air pollution that's killing thousands of people every year. So we're going to put a charge on using those roads.
It depends on the specific scenario. For parking, for example, not charging for it when it's in high demand is generally a bad idea, because you get "overconsumption": people who barely even need it end up using it anyway (hey, it's free!) while people who really need it have a hard time finding any available. So you'll have, say, people who are just storing their occasionally-used car for weeks between uses on the street, while people who are just parking to unload something right now can't get their stuff done.
Then you also end up with people spending a lot of time circling around downtown looking for elusive free parking, which is bad for both traffic and the environment. In contrast, charging a "market rate" that usually leaves 10-15% of parking spots open means that scenario is now transparent and fast: you know you can usually quickly find parking, you know how much it's gonna cost, you can make the calculation ahead of time and execute fast.
We rely too much on money as a determining factor for things. Money does not accurately reflect value, nor does it accurate reflect contributions made to society. So, in that vain, I agree with another poster who said this should all be free. Perhaps with some changes.
> * So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?
Depends on what you consider as payment. I'm in favor of temporary housing (e.g. a tenant is expected to stay in the area no more than five years) being owned and managed by the city in which it's located. "Rent" would go toward maintenance of the building and surrounds, with any extra going back toward city services. Rent could be offset by a number of things - tenant's physical contribution to the maintenance, stipends for public service (e.g. teacher, social workers, etc.), federal grants, etc. The city would be expected to keep rents low. Maintenance could be handled by parks and rec. This is, of course, all dependent on how the city is set up, but I like it as a model.
Permanent housing would also be handled by the city, but only in terms of building and selling. Developers and real estate agents have a LOT of incentive to keep housing prices climbing. Putting this in the hands of the city - not the state, not the feds - has greater potential to help influence positive growth with citizen input while reigning in costs.
The part I have not solved for here is situations like Atherton, which is heavily populated by rich white weirdos who would rather no one other than their own live there, and actively work to discriminate against "undesirables" moving to their city (see the recent hullabaloo there regarding affordable housing). On the one hand, if that's what their democratically elected city government is pushing for, and the citizens agree, that's basically democracy at work. But you can't ignore the folks who are being left behind and simply make them the "problem" of the next city over.
> * No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?
Nope. Tax the companies that ship goods on those roads and bridges fairly and you'll recoup those costs. As should the fees for vehicle licensing.
> * No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow
Nope. Parking is self-managed - if there's no spot, you can't park. Adding money only fills the coffers of the local government, it doesn't really do much to actually address the issue. You may argue that the money could go toward adding more parking structures, but I'd argue back it's wiser to build cities that don't rely so heavily on motorized transit for access. The more parking we add, the less room we have for things like homes and small, locally owned businesses.
> Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
Licensing and passports and all that aren't public goods - they're methods of tax collection, authentication (license ID, passport) and authorization (you need a passport to travel internationally). The fees you pay for them are what ought to ultimately be paying for those services (in addition, yes, to the other taxes we collect).
Free parking is actually bad, particularly in cities, though it's bad for reasons largely specific to cars.
> Putting this in the hands of the city - not the state, not the feds - has greater potential to help influence positive growth with citizen input while reigning in costs.
I'm leery of this; cities have generally shown themselves to be easily swayed by NIMBY's when it comes to housing policy. Just look at how California the state is constantly trying to get cities to build more housing semi-willingly through their local policies, and how pretty much all the coastal cities (who are the same sort of liberals elected to state-wide office, mind) just ignore that and do their best to do the bare minimum.
> Tax the companies that ship goods on those roads and bridges fairly and you'll recoup those costs.
Why though? Like, why is doing taxes on companies superior to, say, general/road tax funds + bridge tolls?
I'm open to the idea of making things free to the user, but I'm not so dogmatic as to think it's the right answer 100% of the time.
> The fees you pay for them are what ought to ultimately be paying for those services (in addition, yes, to the other taxes we collect).
Right, and I'm saying that this reasoning can apply to other things as well. Just because something is at least partially paid for by tax funds somewhere doesn't mean it should have zero cost to the user (though certainly sometimes that's true).
I think this is more of an issue of the GP not having explained why they believe a single cent of public money should mean zero cost for use.
> We rely too much on money as a determining factor for things. Money does not accurately reflect value, nor does it accurate reflect contributions made to society.
Yes, but nevertheless money works better than not doing anything for stuff like street parking. It's simple and effective. Perhaps another system would work better on paper for allocating street parking, but I'm guessing most other suggestions would be a lot more complicated and brittle in practice.
Public money should always mean public access. Not just for journals, but for anything. If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continues.