121–130 of 135 posts
If this was the case WWII would have looked much different. We need exceptions.
>classified research, research resulting in works that generate revenue or royalties for authors (such as books) or patentable discoveries, to the extent necessary to protect a copyright or patent
It's not so simple. Knowledge is power so you don't want to disseminate it blindly. Military weapons (including highly dangerous ones) for instance were designed with publicly funded research and yet everybody would agree that it'd be a bad idea to just publish the plans.
>classified research, research resulting in works that generate revenue or royalties for authors (such as books) or patentable discoveries, to the extent necessary to protect a copyright or patent
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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".
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.
Personally, I think civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns, although they can help to increase awareness. What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons. It would be interesting…
This sounds a lot like the civil disobedience of Google when they started Google Books.
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 consi…
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> * Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking. Unfortunately, that's just not practical. Science has become (always been?) so hyper-specialized that adequately judging impact of publications outside your speciality, let alone your field, has become very hard, unless it's a Huge Deal, in which case nobo…
Rephrasing the gist of your argument: The professors are overloaded, so they cannot do a thorough job when they are on a hiring committee. Therefore, we should use the existing structures that make it trivial to rank applicants, with the unfortunate consequence of us supporting the closed-access journals of today. My biggest disagreement is with the "Therefore" implication, and allow me to illustrate why. As a PhD st…
As a PhD student myself, I have observed the hiring process at my department many times. Here teaching experience counts, and teaching skills are evaluated: the candidate has to give a talk, which is used to evaluate how well the person can teach. I'm pretty sure it's the same in other universities.
Also, if you're interviewing for a teaching professor position, then you have to give a mock lecture with actual students in attendance.
I sympathize with your ideals about how things should be, but at some point one needs to accept the reality. There's no way to magically find time in professors' time for a review of papers "out of the left field". There aren't any incentives for that, and I don't imagine any universities investing extra money into that. I mean, most professors aren't formally paid for administrative tasks, unless they hold some kind of official title (Department Director, Dean etc.). What they're paid for is research and teaching.
One relatively easy way to fix that would be to publish reviews along with the papers. While you and I would both agree that many reviews are rubbish, many others still are quite insightful and can serve a more expressive indicator of quality than journal/conference ranking and citation count.
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60-70% public money How are you judging the percentage there? Are you including the cost of drugs that don't get approved?
According to somebody who works in this industry it is the standard contribution. Does not matter if the drug does not get approved, the money is for the research, as far as I know.
If you compare the NIH budget vs. the major pharmaceutical companies, it's a 2 to 1 ration. And not all the NIH budget is spent on drug research. It's mostly basic science.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Again, the post was addressing the absurd proposal that "If your university takes any federal money , all research has to be open."
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.
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.
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 co…
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.
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Yeah, why not? Isn't it based on tons of other research from third countries, from Indian mathematics to Newton and Leibniz that you haven't funded either?
The usual reason is that then there is an incentive to not spend your own money on research and to just wait for someone else to do it for you. Then we just get stuck in a waiting game.
Besides, those that actually do the research also get other benefits, like having people already familiar at a high level with it, getting to derive and manufacture/patent etc stuff based on the research sooner, etc.