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U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

science.org

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Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#171

Post by jfengel »

amelius wrote: post #150
jfengel wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles This is not something done to us by leadership. This is a democracy; we voted for this. We have another election coming up momentarily. We have the opportunity to put a stop to this. There's good reason to think that the election will not be entirely fair, but there are limits: if people a…

It is an information problem. A majority of voters believes in the nonsense that is spread on social media, and are not properly informed about important topics.

Proper information is readily available, and everyone on social media has been constantly exhorted to avoid scams.

At this point if people are being taken in by the really obvious and bald lies, the problem isn't a lack of information. They're just plain stupid.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#172

Post by ipaddr »

fragmede wrote: post #143
brookst wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying Congress should be domain experts every area they allocate funds to? From maritime safety to preschool nutrition, congress should be expert enough in everything to specify all important details, and then the agencies (staffed by actual domain experts in each area) are mere accountants to execute the policies? I don’t think it’s workable. At best it just swaps lobbyists for civil servants.

Ostensibly, who's paying their salary is important. Lobbyists, paid for by corporations with a vested interest in things going their way, is far worse than civil servants who's salary comes from taxpayers, and who's responsibility is to them, and not corporate interests. Ostensibly.

People don't vote for civil servants their loyality is not with the public but themselves. Congress's loyality is with donors and/or leader's who's loyality is with donors.

Nothing will work when the courts decide giving money is speech and now protected. Super pacs have unlimited spending and shield donors.

It's hard to change. You need a new supreme court or amendment to remove super pacs then you need to convince the people who got in power by having more money to limit donations to an amount an average American can afford. Then you need laws to fix gerrymandering or possible an amendment. Then you need radical laws to deal with immigration vote buy which mlght involve rules not allowing people not born in the country from voting.

And then we will realize that people with more money will actually need more power because they have bigger needs. So they will start buying people through convert ways (media ownership, ai filtered data, ...) and we'll have more disinformation. Maybe this is the best democracy can offer.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#173

Post by charcircuit »

ranguna wrote: post #122
charcircuit wrote: post #117

Foreigners are not entitled to my tax dollars. They can find other ways to fund their work.

I don't think that's how it works, mate.

We fought a whole war over not sending our taxes to foreigners (Britain). A foreign nation being entitled to your tax money is what happens when that foreign nation has conquered you.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#175

Post by shevy-java »

BeetleB wrote: post #2

This could be understandable if some rationale was provided, but it's worse than that: > Neither agency has publicly issued new formal guidance describing these requirements. Instead, officials are informing grantees individually, leaving researchers confused and concerned. They've not even made it official. They're just randomly flagging.

There is a rationale: it is an ideology that Trump uses here. It is very similar to the 1930s, just adapted to a more "modern" era, with entertainment (if people manage to not die due to boredom, watching epic movies such as Melania ...). Did people already forget a certain billionaire raising his right arm? They are trolling on top of pillaging the taxpayers here.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#176

Post by shevy-java »

kergonath wrote: post #152
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy. This is what is so hard for me to handle, and it really feels like I'm grieving a death. Because no matter what happens, even if some things eventually get better, I feel like the US as I knew it is dead - there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would…

> there is simply no coming back from the fact that it's been laid bare how quickly and easily vast swaths of our political leadership would sell out to completely destroy our Constitutional principles. I think you are right. At the same time it’s also an opportunity to get rid of an outdated constitution and have another go, with the benefit of 250 more years of experience. Just don’t fall into complacency: this gov…

I don't think they can get rid of the constitution. It would require a near total control of all judges right now and I don't think they have that.

What they will instead do is continually test the boundaries and shift them. They will also put in loyalists. Aka corruption. This already happened in the army by the way. It's fascinating to see how a democracy is turned into a dictatorship.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#177

Post by tptacek »

lovich wrote: post #112
pdonis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Giving up is not a strategy. Nor is it what I advocated. > Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity That's usually true, but it's not the main problem. The main problem is that the regulations don't actually regulate, in the sense they need to. All they do is entrench the incumbent corporations that paid good money for them, by making it harder for competitors to enter their marke…

[flagged]

Just a quick note that Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a novel, not a work of reporting.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#178

Post by nxobject »

wyldberry wrote: post #61
matthewdgreen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many graduate students, faculty and post-docs are foreign citizens. So banning them from conducting research could potentially shut down big research projects. It is not surprising to me that the NIH and other funding agencies didn't want to do this. (It is also unsurprising to me that the current administration would have few qualms about disrupting research: we know they don't care, ask the cancer studies that had…

I don't have great sources on hand, this is just coming from a career situated in or adjacent to protecting research and IP from espionage. As the national labs and prime defense contractors got exceptional at defending their networks, this pushed state actors into attempting espionage at the university level. It's a lot easier to get access to underpaid graduate students, fresh post-docs, etc who are doing the heavy…

Hi there – someone who's worked on NIH (NIMH) funded projects. Our primary interest is in being transparent and reproducible. NIH has supported this for a long time – e.g. pushing people to post deidentified datasets online in central repositories. Since it's also good practice to provide your code in a reproducibility package, there is, literally, nothing to hide.

Recent MAHA-era large-scale funding opportunities have embraced this as "gold-standard science", and explicitly require separate reproducibility teams.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#179

Post by archimedes237 »

bo1024 wrote: post #103
kittikitti wrote: post #15

I knew that most research had ties to government funding but it was only recently that I realized the scale of it. Along with the pullback of any government funding remotely resembling DEI, policies like the one described in the article wouldn't decimate research from my previous understanding. In terms of influence, it's now clear to me that the government controls anywhere between 75 to 99% of academic research. I…

Your current understanding also seems a bit warped. The US government provides the source of a lot of research funding but historically exerts little "control". Generally grant applications are evaluated by panels of researchers who don't work for the federal government. Also, this government funding supports fundamental innovations that private companies wouldn't fund because it's too general and too far from moneti…

"a lot" must mean 99% either directly through grants or indirectly by the gov paying the universities directly.

Re: U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators

#180

Post by bonsai_spool »

petcat wrote: post #13

The article says that these restrictions on research with a "foreign component" have been in place since at least 2003 but have only recently been clarified to include the researchers themselves. It's actually more surprising to me that NIH and NASA research co-authored by non-Americans was supposedly not requiring scrutiny under the "foreign component" rules before this.

> It's actually more surprising to me that NIH and NASA research co-authored by non-Americans was supposedly not requiring scrutiny under the "foreign component" rules before this.

Let us not be fooled by the obvious pretense, please.

Can anyone honestly say that the current administration is a paragon of careful scrutiny and rule-following? If you are wont to agree, then momentarily reflect if this question was ever posed in an earlier presidential administration in your lifetime.

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