Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

whitehouse.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 293 posts

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#121

Post by FabHK »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #50
afarrell wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if one of the people who would do that is currently on a boat in Lake Winnipesaukee. Not if {insert 20 other sources of complexity that exist in the real world}.

Give them an afternoon and then charge them a $2500 a day fine for any federally funded research not made available. They'll fix it that afternoon. I'm sure Jake can remote in from Lake Winnipesaukee. Apolegetics for bad, unethical, and world damaging polices, be it corporate or otherwise, are unacceptable.

This is guidance to federal agencies to update their policies to require free access for results they funded going forward.

So, the issue is not to flip a switch on a server to disable a paywall. The issue is to change official policy at many agencies, which will then trickle down. You can't just retroactively change the terms on existing grants.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#122

Post by franciscojgo »

At last. I genuinely believe there should be classes in high school teaching how to read papers as well.

Around COVID, I'm sure +90% of the population relied on online news sources giving their click-bait-y interpretation of studies. (if at all read, perhaps just the abstract)

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#123

Post by logisticseh »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #88
logisticseh wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. An…

There's a difference between the government paying to use software and paying for it to be developed.

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.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#124

Post by [deleted] »

expensive_news wrote: post #48
bglazer wrote: post #23

This is good news. Academic publishers are parasites and anything that reduces their stranglehold on academic knowledge is good. That said, parasites are, if nothing else, resilient. So, there's a few issues that I'm concerned about. First, it's not clear to me that university libraries will be able to drop their subscriptions to these journals based on this decision. The vast majority of research receives some feder…

Maybe I’m missing something, but if Nature charges that much to publish why does anyone publish in Nature? Why don’t academics just create their own ‘ethically priced’ journal? It’s my understanding that most of Nature’s labor is voluntary and unpaid anyway.

[deleted]

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#125

Post by elliotec »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #118
Test0129 wrote: post #39

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 continu…

> 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? *…

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.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#126

Post by hedora »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #99

So, we don't have to pay for the access, great. But searching for and collating all these tens of thousands of papers in each federal repository will have to be done... manually... by every researcher. .....Oh. You wanted search? You wanted indexing? You wanted a centrally managed service to pull from all those different federal repositories? Well, you're gonna need a company to develop all that and run it. You can u…

Shh!!! if someone at Usenix finds out, the entire organization will disappear in a puff of logic!

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#127

Post by hedora »

derbOac wrote: post #103
jhallenworld wrote: post #37

Great! How about we reduce the cost of college by eliminating the equally parasitical textbook industry?

My department seriously discussed making our own textbooks for at least one class. The idea never got off the ground, although I think it was a good idea. Part of the reason really is that there were no incentives for doing so, no real teaching or research credit, no grant dollars brought it, etc. The other end of it too was that there was a lot of pressure to turn it into a profit-making venture. Rather than it be o…

Your story makes it pretty clear what the solution is:

Change college accreditation / federal financial support rules so that the cost of textbooks is rolled up in the university's tuition fee, and standardize tuitions across departments within each university.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#128

Post by ejb999 »

m463 wrote: post #85
jhallenworld wrote: post #37

Great! How about we reduce the cost of college by eliminating the equally parasitical textbook industry?

I think there needs to be good textbooks, but there could be some GOOD rules for conflicts of interest with respect to who chooses/requires which textbooks.

you mean like my kid's class a few years back, where the 'textbook' was about $75, and was written by the person getting paid to teach the class, and was just about 150 pages of plain white paper stapled together with no binding?

Get paid to teach the class, and then also make 100 or more students pay for some photocopies, the money which goes directly into the professors pocket - oh yea, and then change a few paragraphs each year and tell next year's class they can't rely on previous years books - i.e. no resale market for the 'book' you just bought.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#129

Post by TulliusCicero »

elliotec wrote: post #125
TulliusCicero wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? *…

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.

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.

Re: Guidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay

#130

Post by vosper »

elliotec wrote: post #125
TulliusCicero wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? *…

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.

Post reply on HN