[c3534l]

The government subsidizes research because we believe that research provides a public good that cannot be easily packaged and sold at a profit. So even though you are able to sell trade journals and such, the benefit to society is actually much greater than the price of the journal. Okay, fine. We subsidize vaccines, education, all sorts of stuff. We probably don't subsidize research enough, especially when you consider rapidly dropping funding for our public universities.

But the point of a subsidy is to make the producers of a good produce more of it than they would otherwise by making it more profitable for them to do so. If you were to ban profiting off of research at all, then you'd actually be discouraging the production of that good.

Some people have been arguing lately for something even more absurd, which is that if a university receives any public funding at all, then all of their research has been tainted by the transitive property of government funding and must be released to everyone for free and fuck the hard work the researchers put into it.

You're essentially asking for the government to limit all science funding to only government projects, like the government is commissioning science to be done. This puts too much control in the hands of bureaucrats and the ebb and flow of politics.

If, on the other hand, you want the government to provide the service of providing research to the general public, we have something like that and they're called libraries. Maybe you should band together to improve the kinds of services libraries offer.

[Lawtonfogle]

>Some people have been arguing lately for something even more absurd, which is that if a university receives any public funding at all, then all of their research has been tainted by the transitive property of government funding and must be released to everyone for free and fuck the hard work the researchers put into it.

You do realize that often researchers have to pay to publish in journals. They don't make money from the papers being distributed. If anything, getting rid of the journals will give them more money back as they would stop having to pay to publish them in for-profit journals.

[Fomite]

I think the suggestion here is more "Because Joe over in Agriculture took USDA money, I suddenly can't do contract work for Large Company because they want to keep it proprietary".

[Lawtonfogle]

If he has used up the USDA money and switched to private sector, where is the problem? If he wants to do work for Large Company with USDA money, then that is a problem and I see no reason to not ban it.

[Fomite]

Again, the post was addressing the absurd proposal that "If your university takes any federal money, all research has to be open."

[Lawtonfogle]

All research the university does is different than all research the professor does.

As long as they are at a university being funded by the public, the public has a claim to the research. If they want to do private research, they can switch to the private.

If a person is being paid by the public, why should they be able to spend their time and resources working in private? Think of it like a general IP ownership agreement at work. Anything you create at work, using the tools your work provides, belongs to the one paying you. Now claims like any similar work you do even after you leave, or work you do on your own equipment on your own time are unreasonable, but I see nothing wrong with that requirement while being paid by the public and using equipment paid for by the public.

[Fomite]

The thing is how academics are actually paid doesn't work like that.

"The university" is not funded by the public. It's funded by Federal money, and State money, and tuition, and commercial grants and donations. Just claiming that's "being funded by the public" is claiming 100% of the output, while not providing 100% of the input.

Similarly, I'm not paid from a single source. I'm paid through a mix of state money, federal money, and yes, some commercial grants. If a commercial entity wants to pay for a portion of my lab's expenses and salary, why should "the public" be entitled to the proceeds?

That's the problem being argued against - not that public money should mean public access, but that "some public money" (no matter how small) suddenly entitles the public to everything.

[coliveira]

Exactly, it is funny that I never see these advocates for free information fighting to expand our library system. Libraries are the best way to promote access to information because they are by nature distributed, there is no central servers or web-based organization to control how they share information.