[tombert]

I always thought it was weird that it wasn't always publicly available. I'm ok with allocating taxdollars to funding new research, but I think that if my taxdollars go to something, I should have access to it.

I can see where there should be exceptions like in cases of national security or maybe if minors are involved, but otherwise I think public stuff should actually be public.

[TallGuyShort]

Shout out to NASA and whoever did this, as they've always had a much clearer mandate to make things public domain. On their website they explicitly state that images, models, etc. are not copyrighted unless they were copyrighted by someone else and used with permission.

[cowsandmilk]

That isn't a NASA policy, that is the law about works by government employees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...

This is actually reflected in the copyright agreements at every major journal. See, for instance, Form B at the ACS journals.

http://pubs.acs.org/page/copyright/journals/index.html

The difference is in whom the employer is. If you are employed by a university doing work on a government grant, you are not a federal employee, so the work is copyrighted.

[TallGuyShort]

I suspected the all-government-employees thing but wasn't aware of the journal copyright aspect. Thanks for clarifying with sources!

[tombert]

Is that true?! I think I might have a few new desktop backgrounds coming up...

It totally makes sense. I kind of thought the whole point of public research was so that everyone could benefit.

[TallGuyShort]

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/guidelines/index.html

There are some restrictions but they're all very sensible, like forbidding the use of official logos to imply endorsement, etc.

[zmb_]

I don't think that's a winning argument. Your tax dollars pay for space rockets and fighter planes too, but you don't get to ride them. There are many such things that you pay for, and that you get some indirect benefits from, including the pay-walled research. And in many fields the researchers take big pay cuts compared to what they'd make in the industry, meaning they are effectively paying a large chunk of the cost of creating the research themselves.

I also don't think requiring open access is the solution. It just ends up pumping more money into the publishers' already ridiculous profit margins, since authors must pay more to have their articles open access while the universities still have to pay for access to the journals. And of course the funding bodies don't increase their funding, so the open access fees just mean less money for salaries and less research getting done.

The solution I advocate is for governments to directly set up and fund high quality open access journals and conferences. Given the choice I'd much rather submit to, and review for, such a venue than a for-profit publisher.

[tombert]

Sure, I'll agree we can't have a completely open-door policy for everything because that would be chaos, but for stuff that's easy to make copies of I think we should.

So to go with your example, I agree we don't all get to ride in spaceships (much as I'd like to), but I do think that it's not unreasonable to request the rocket designs and published papers that came out of NASA when they were building these rockets.