

Should you have to pay to see research your taxes paid for? - kkim
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/31/AR2007103102668_pf.html

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erdos2
Government funded research is one way of transferring the risk of product
development from business to the tax payer. If the research succeeds in
creating a marketable product, the taxpayer return on the investment is the
opportunity to pay for it as a consumer. In many cases, but certainly not all
cases, the end result is a publication, ownership of which is transferred to a
commercial scientific publishing company.

In many disciplines, not only scientific, academics have decided that it makes
more sense to publish their own journals electronically. Open source systems
like the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal System, together with freely
available text processing systems such as LaTex make the transition from
commercial publication to open source publication straightforward and
inexpensive. Academics already have considerable experience writing, editing
and refereeing academic publications for no pay for commercial enterprises,
which generally demand the copyright in return for publication.

Editorial boards have been frustrated by concerns over ownership and pricing
of the journals they edit. Some boards have decided to quit working for
commercial publishers and form their own journals, taking their experience and
prestige with them.

But who gets to own tax-payer funded journal publications is the tip of the
economic iceberg.

The Man will come and get me for saying this: look at virtually any government
grant application. You'll find a section that reads (more or less), "if the
research results will be transferred to a corporation, enter the name and
address of the corporation below." It looks innocuous enough, but it isn't. It
means that you can use government funds to pay for research and development,
and transfer anything profitable to a corporation--no questions asked. The
tax-payer might get the opportunity to pay as the ultimate consumer for some
product his dollars helped to finance, but all the profit will have gone to
some corporation.

If this fact is pointed out, it's often excused as "the only system we have";
or "the benefit to the consumer in the form of new products and services is
compensation enough"--a matter for politics to decide; or else the implied
critique of the inequity is attacked as socialist, as if the spectrum of
economic alternatives consisted of precisely two points: capitalism and
communism. But a more equitable system could be envisioned, in which tax-payer
funded capital gains are shared with the tax payer and corporations.

Imagine if one approached YC for seed money with the following proposition:
Paul Graham and his crew would invest in your startup. However, YC would not
receive a portion of the company; instead YC would benefit by being given the
opportunity to pay, as an end consumer like everyone else, for whatever
product or service your startup developed. If you could get this deal, it
would be irrational not to take it. And the raw end of that deal is what the
public gets with the current tax-payer funded research and development scheme.

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JustPassing
Erdos2 makes some good, interesting, points but I wonder how often that
section on a grant form asking if the research results will be transferred to
a corporation is used? How easy would it be to get this through peer review? I
suspect that under current funding conditions, very difficult unless the
company was supplying serious cash and unique expertise. If I was sat on a
review panel and saw a proposal saying that "This work will be great but we
will not publish it and everything will belong to company X", my response
would be "Why isn't X paying for everything then?". Actually my response would
be quicker and firmer, but you get the drift.

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jgamman
AOL vs the web: Facebook vs Open Social etc etc pay walls are always evil.

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thehigherlife
no

