8 ms·

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 owne

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 continues.

koheripbal 4y ago
I assume military R&D would be a big exception?
- logisticseh 4y ago
  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. And it's not just government licenses, but also anyone who interacts with the government. E.g., try interacting with any government agency without an Office 365 license. You get really funny looks if you say that MSFT should have to give away Office 365 for free if the government is going to use it for anything. But total USG spend on closed-source software has to be well into the 30B-50B range conservatively. For reference, the entire NSF budget is $10B. The main reason for this is that there are many monied and powerful stakeholders who benefit from selling closed software to USG, whereas the academic publishers a tiny, often not even American-owned, and got super greedy and screwed their natural contingency (academics hate them as much as or more than anyone else).
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    There's a difference between the government paying to use software and paying for it to be developed.
    - rcthompson 4y ago
      I'm not sure the difference is as cut and dry as you're making it out to be. A big organization doesn't just pay Microsoft a zillion dollars for a million Office licenses and then never talk to them again. There's an ongoing support relationship, which for large enough customers might include things like developing features on request.
    - logisticseh 4y ago
      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.
      - pksebben 4y ago
        I think part of the point here, is that the value from that investment should go to the investors, who are (if you buy the 'by the people, for the people' hype) the taxpayers. Say I'm vulture capitalist Tom, and I pay a few gajillion dollars to developer Gupta to create a product for me. I would be understandably pissed if Gupta turned around and sold that same product to competitor vc Janet. She didn't pay for that dev work, I did.
        logisticseh 4y ago
        1. There isn't as much of a difference here as you think. Contractors do turn around and use components developed in public contracts for other consulting projects. Most commonly with other sovereigns, especially when the original contract was with a city or state, but sometimes at the national level as well. 2. With respect to R&D, one big difference is that the government doesn't provide seed funding. They provide grants. If the government wanted equity in research labs, they'd have to pay a lot more. You'll see this in practice if you ever have the extreme displeasure of doing non-useless research in academia. Companies that insist on IP ownership/sharing end up paying much higher premiums for university research contracts. Repealing Bayh-Dole would have no effect on the accessibility of actually useful research; universities and companies would privately fund the useful stuff and leave the government to fund the labs of politically-connected/twitter-famous but otherwise totally useless academics. (To be clear: we're on the same side here with respect to open access publications.)
  - JamesBarney 4y ago
    The other difference is if you had to open source anything sold to the USG then no one would sell anything closed source to the USG. And there's lots of useful software the government wants to buy that is closed source.
    - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
      Useful to who, and for what?
      - joebob42 4y ago
        The usg, for whatever that piece of software says on the tin. Unless you are just asking if there is any closed source software anywhere which provides value not totally replicable using oss, which seems like a silly question.
- elil17 4y ago
  "public access to federally funded research results and data should be maximized in a manner that protects confidentiality, privacy, business confidential information, and security, avoids negative impact on intellectual property rights, innovation, program and operational improvements, and U.S. competitiveness, and preserves the balance between the relative value of long-term preservation and access and the associated cost and administrative burden"
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  It would have to be. It's simply part of it being military, state secrets, etc.
- jjk166 4y ago
  I don't think military R&D produces many academic papers, but anything going in a journal a foreign national can just buy should probably also be made available to the tax payer.
  - mattkrause 4y ago
    It does! DARPA is probably the best-known route and funds a lot of academic and corporate research (including, for a while, me). The DoD also has a bunch of other grant-making programs (Office of Naval Research, Congressionally-directed Medical Research Program, etc) and also labs that directly do research themselves. The Air Force has a big research center (AFRL) in Ohio; the army has one in Maryland (ARL), and the Navy has one in DC (NRL). There are loads of other sites as well: the army has a night vision research lab in New Jersey, for example, and the Navy has some marine mammal stuff on the West Coast. A lot of this work--even the stuff done at DoD labs--winds up in open literature. By policy all of that is supposed to be publicly available, so you can browse it here https://discover.dtic.mil/products-services/ https://discover.dtic.mil/products-services/.
    - jjk166 4y ago
      I'm not referring to military funded research, I'm referring to military R&D as an academic discipline, in the same way one would refer to something like medical research.
  - hervature 4y ago
    > I don't think military R&D produces many academic papers Do you mean researchers employed by the military? Otherwise, basically half of every STEM professor I encountered had funding via some branch of the military.
    - jjk166 4y ago
      I mean military as an academic field. The stuff that people might conceivably be worried about making publicly available and thus want exempted.
  - 4y ago
fudged71 4y ago
Does “public” here refer to nationally-available, or internationally? Should I be able to access your taxpayer’s research?
- RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
  All persons. The principals enshrined in the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence specify no nation in particular. Freedom of information is a direct extension of the Declaration of Independence.
  - elil17 4y ago
    I would say the real reason is that it's pretty impractical to limit it to just Americans given that we don't have any sort of national e-identity.
    - stjohnswarts 4y ago
      we do through the international patent system. We should get money back for our tax dollars, simple as that. We could work it into international patents. I know some countries ignore those, but we can make them pay in other ways like tariffs and treaties.
      - bruce511 4y ago
        Not to be that guy, but other countries don't pay tarrifs, Americans do. The tarrif is levied on the importer, who then passes that cost on to the consumer. The tarrif is not paid by the exporter. The goal of a tariff is to _increase_ the customer price for some good locally, and thus make a local (more expensive) good more compeditive. A foreign country may experience lower demand for their product, but its not like they "pay any money". Yes, lower demand may lead to a lower price, or it may mean they export to other countries instead.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  We should be able to use the international patent system for that. Make it publically open to any single "citizen" any international corp seizing on it should have to pay patent fees to the general fund of the US treasury or something set up to feed it back into our government sponsored R&D programs.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I agree. All that data should be publically available for reproduction of the work as well as open season. No one should be able to patent it either, or should only be able to file a patent to make it "publically available into perpetuity" to protect it. If tax dollars funded it, we own it as a society. If companies foot the bill then maybe something more complicated needs to exist, but if it is 100% public funded, universities should not be able to sell it off to corps.
- boas 4y ago
  That's the system we had in the 1970s (government owned the patent to government-funded research). And what happened is that the government didn't know what to do with the patents, and the inventors, who were best positioned to commercialize their invention, could not justify spending time and money to commercialize something that they didn't own. So the Bayh Dole act of 1980 allowed universities to commercialize their federally funded inventions. The result was an explosion of startups, especially in the biotech industry. Example: John Adler received some government funding to develop Cyberknife (image-guided radiation therapy). But he couldn't get follow up funding to commercialize this revolutionary new technology. So he took out a second mortgage on his house to commercialize the invention. And now image-guided radiation therapy is a standard treatment for many types of cancer. There's no way he would have taken out that large personal loan, if he didn't own the intellectual property. There's a large gap between a patent, and a commercially viable product. And if you showed the patent to "experts" in the field, they would likely tell you that it's worthless. Great ideas are only obvious in retrospect. The inventor has the vision, motivation, and knowledge to make their invention a reality, but they can't quit their job and get external funding, if they can't own their invention.
  - spfzero 4y ago
    The research results should not be patentable. If someone wants to then productize the research, they can patent any methods they can independently come up with, as long as they didn't use public money for that as well. That is plenty of latitude for seeding start-ups and commercializing technology. There is no need to lock up the actual research so that only the researcher and their university can commercialize it, protected from competition. It does a disservice to the people who's money paid for the research behind it.
mlindner 4y ago
> If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continues. I wouldn't go this far. Part of the current revolution in the private space industry is precisely allowing companies to own products that were partially funded by taxpayer dollars. As it encourages companies to fund their own money into it, rather than simply relying 100% on government funding. Further if the government wants to encourage some industry, by using tax dollars to fund it they would instead destroy that industry. Many companies would end up simply refusing government grants because they know they could never profitably sell it if it would simply be copied. Or they would charge the government significantly more for the product. Now yes, if the research is done at federal centers that simply exist for research rather than creating products, yes absolutely put it out for free immediately, so that it can get into products faster.
- sidewndr46 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure the US doesn't need a revolution in the federal government subsidizing private business ventures. We've got more than enough of that already. The idea of federal funding being verboten in the corporate world is more akin to an ideal state, rather than one to be avoided.
- briffle 4y ago
  Yep, that is how the Chinese government and industry has gotten so far ahead in Flow Batteries: https://www.opb.org/article/2022/08/03/the-u-s-made-a-breakthrough-battery-discovery-then-gave-the-technology-to-china/ https://www.opb.org/article/2022/08/03/the-u-s-made-a-breakt...
  - boogies 4y ago
    The DoE didn’t free that tech to the public, the US government’s using licensing to actively prevent American companies from competing with the Chinese one they allowed a sublicense to be granted to (from your link): > Forever Energy, a Bellevue, Wash., based company, is one of several U.S. companies that have been trying to get a license from the Department of Energy to make the batteries. Joanne Skievaski, Forever Energy's chief financial officer, has been trying to get hold of a license for more than a year and called the department's decision to allow foreign manufacturing "mind boggling."
heavyset_go 4y ago
I feel the same about NIH funded research and development in the medical space.
- hyperbovine 4y ago
  NIH-funded research goes up on PubMed Central within 12 months of publication: https://www.nih.gov/health-information/nih-clinical-research-trials-you/what-is-nih-public-access-policy https://www.nih.gov/health-information/nih-clinical-research...
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    I meant with regard to the ability for anyone to use it without, say, violating patents. Plenty of drugs discovered and developed with NIH money go on to be patented by private companies.
    - hyperbovine 4y ago
      I take your point, but OTOH it's difficult to envision a world where drugs actually get brought to market without patent protection. The amount of money and risk involved is just astronomical.
      - heavyset_go 4y ago
        I'd be happy funding drug development, clinical trials, etc with public funds, as well. I also believe there are opportunities for companies to profit without being given exclusive manufacturing rights via patents.
TulliusCicero 4y ago
> 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? * No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time? * No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow * Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
- elliotec 4y ago
  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.
  - TulliusCicero 4y ago
    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.
  - vosper 4y ago
    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.
hyperbovine 4y ago
When was this? The NSF has had a 12-month open access policy in place for almost a decade now: https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16009/nsf16009.jsp#q1 https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16009/nsf16009.jsp#q1
- librarianscott 4y ago
  Now they are removing the 12-month post-publication embargo period for peer-reviewed manuscripts that result from federally funded scientific research. So, 12 months sooner.
majormajor 4y ago
Imagine if a VC putting in "one red cent" meant that the founders and employees in a new company couldn't capture any of the returns themselves... Why should the government be different than other investors here? Putting in money != doing the work. You have to have the funding, but you also have to have the work, and money alone doesn't guarantee success.
- fphhotchips 4y ago
  Your analogy fails because it's not the people doing work in science that are capturing the returns. It's a bunch of rent-seeking publishers whose entire business model is extortion. This is more like if a VC funded you, but Google said they wouldn't render your page in Chrome unless people paid them for access, and also you aren't allowed to take payment.
cmurf 4y ago
All those red cents going to proprietary software licensing... Lots of Windows licenses in the federal government.

koheripbal 4y ago

I assume military R&D would be a big exception?

logisticseh 4y ago
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. And it's not just government licenses, but also anyone who interacts with the government. E.g., try interacting with any government agency without an Office 365 license. You get really funny looks if you say that MSFT should have to give away Office 365 for free if the government is going to use it for anything. But total USG spend on closed-source software has to be well into the 30B-50B range conservatively. For reference, the entire NSF budget is $10B. The main reason for this is that there are many monied and powerful stakeholders who benefit from selling closed software to USG, whereas the academic publishers a tiny, often not even American-owned, and got super greedy and screwed their natural contingency (academics hate them as much as or more than anyone else).
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  There's a difference between the government paying to use software and paying for it to be developed.
  - rcthompson 4y ago
    I'm not sure the difference is as cut and dry as you're making it out to be. A big organization doesn't just pay Microsoft a zillion dollars for a million Office licenses and then never talk to them again. There's an ongoing support relationship, which for large enough customers might include things like developing features on request.
  - logisticseh 4y ago
    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.
    - pksebben 4y ago
      I think part of the point here, is that the value from that investment should go to the investors, who are (if you buy the 'by the people, for the people' hype) the taxpayers. Say I'm vulture capitalist Tom, and I pay a few gajillion dollars to developer Gupta to create a product for me. I would be understandably pissed if Gupta turned around and sold that same product to competitor vc Janet. She didn't pay for that dev work, I did.
      - logisticseh 4y ago
        1. There isn't as much of a difference here as you think. Contractors do turn around and use components developed in public contracts for other consulting projects. Most commonly with other sovereigns, especially when the original contract was with a city or state, but sometimes at the national level as well. 2. With respect to R&D, one big difference is that the government doesn't provide seed funding. They provide grants. If the government wanted equity in research labs, they'd have to pay a lot more. You'll see this in practice if you ever have the extreme displeasure of doing non-useless research in academia. Companies that insist on IP ownership/sharing end up paying much higher premiums for university research contracts. Repealing Bayh-Dole would have no effect on the accessibility of actually useful research; universities and companies would privately fund the useful stuff and leave the government to fund the labs of politically-connected/twitter-famous but otherwise totally useless academics. (To be clear: we're on the same side here with respect to open access publications.)
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  The other difference is if you had to open source anything sold to the USG then no one would sell anything closed source to the USG. And there's lots of useful software the government wants to buy that is closed source.
  - aaaaaaaaata 4y ago
    Useful to who, and for what?
    - joebob42 4y ago
      The usg, for whatever that piece of software says on the tin. Unless you are just asking if there is any closed source software anywhere which provides value not totally replicable using oss, which seems like a silly question.
elil17 4y ago
"public access to federally funded research results and data should be maximized in a manner that protects confidentiality, privacy, business confidential information, and security, avoids negative impact on intellectual property rights, innovation, program and operational improvements, and U.S. competitiveness, and preserves the balance between the relative value of long-term preservation and access and the associated cost and administrative burden"
stjohnswarts 4y ago
It would have to be. It's simply part of it being military, state secrets, etc.
jjk166 4y ago
I don't think military R&D produces many academic papers, but anything going in a journal a foreign national can just buy should probably also be made available to the tax payer.
- mattkrause 4y ago
  It does! DARPA is probably the best-known route and funds a lot of academic and corporate research (including, for a while, me). The DoD also has a bunch of other grant-making programs (Office of Naval Research, Congressionally-directed Medical Research Program, etc) and also labs that directly do research themselves. The Air Force has a big research center (AFRL) in Ohio; the army has one in Maryland (ARL), and the Navy has one in DC (NRL). There are loads of other sites as well: the army has a night vision research lab in New Jersey, for example, and the Navy has some marine mammal stuff on the West Coast. A lot of this work--even the stuff done at DoD labs--winds up in open literature. By policy all of that is supposed to be publicly available, so you can browse it here https://discover.dtic.mil/products-services/ https://discover.dtic.mil/products-services/.
  - jjk166 4y ago
    I'm not referring to military funded research, I'm referring to military R&D as an academic discipline, in the same way one would refer to something like medical research.
- hervature 4y ago
  > I don't think military R&D produces many academic papers Do you mean researchers employed by the military? Otherwise, basically half of every STEM professor I encountered had funding via some branch of the military.
  - jjk166 4y ago
    I mean military as an academic field. The stuff that people might conceivably be worried about making publicly available and thus want exempted.
- 4y ago

fudged71 4y ago

Does “public” here refer to nationally-available, or internationally? Should I be able to access your taxpayer’s research?

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
All persons. The principals enshrined in the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence specify no nation in particular. Freedom of information is a direct extension of the Declaration of Independence.
- elil17 4y ago
  I would say the real reason is that it's pretty impractical to limit it to just Americans given that we don't have any sort of national e-identity.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    we do through the international patent system. We should get money back for our tax dollars, simple as that. We could work it into international patents. I know some countries ignore those, but we can make them pay in other ways like tariffs and treaties.
    - bruce511 4y ago
      Not to be that guy, but other countries don't pay tarrifs, Americans do. The tarrif is levied on the importer, who then passes that cost on to the consumer. The tarrif is not paid by the exporter. The goal of a tariff is to _increase_ the customer price for some good locally, and thus make a local (more expensive) good more compeditive. A foreign country may experience lower demand for their product, but its not like they "pay any money". Yes, lower demand may lead to a lower price, or it may mean they export to other countries instead.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
We should be able to use the international patent system for that. Make it publically open to any single "citizen" any international corp seizing on it should have to pay patent fees to the general fund of the US treasury or something set up to feed it back into our government sponsored R&D programs.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

I agree. All that data should be publically available for reproduction of the work as well as open season. No one should be able to patent it either, or should only be able to file a patent to make it "publically available into perpetuity" to protect it. If tax dollars funded it, we own it as a society. If companies foot the bill then maybe something more complicated needs to exist, but if it is 100% public funded, universities should not be able to sell it off to corps.

boas 4y ago
That's the system we had in the 1970s (government owned the patent to government-funded research). And what happened is that the government didn't know what to do with the patents, and the inventors, who were best positioned to commercialize their invention, could not justify spending time and money to commercialize something that they didn't own. So the Bayh Dole act of 1980 allowed universities to commercialize their federally funded inventions. The result was an explosion of startups, especially in the biotech industry. Example: John Adler received some government funding to develop Cyberknife (image-guided radiation therapy). But he couldn't get follow up funding to commercialize this revolutionary new technology. So he took out a second mortgage on his house to commercialize the invention. And now image-guided radiation therapy is a standard treatment for many types of cancer. There's no way he would have taken out that large personal loan, if he didn't own the intellectual property. There's a large gap between a patent, and a commercially viable product. And if you showed the patent to "experts" in the field, they would likely tell you that it's worthless. Great ideas are only obvious in retrospect. The inventor has the vision, motivation, and knowledge to make their invention a reality, but they can't quit their job and get external funding, if they can't own their invention.
- spfzero 4y ago
  The research results should not be patentable. If someone wants to then productize the research, they can patent any methods they can independently come up with, as long as they didn't use public money for that as well. That is plenty of latitude for seeding start-ups and commercializing technology. There is no need to lock up the actual research so that only the researcher and their university can commercialize it, protected from competition. It does a disservice to the people who's money paid for the research behind it.

mlindner 4y ago

> If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continues. I wouldn't go this far. Part of the current revolution in the private space industry is precisely allowing companies to own products that were partially funded by taxpayer dollars. As it encourages companies to fund their own money into it, rather than simply relying 100% on government funding. Further if the government wants to encourage some industry, by using tax dollars to fund it they would instead destroy that industry. Many companies would end up simply refusing government grants because they know they could never profitably sell it if it would simply be copied. Or they would charge the government significantly more for the product. Now yes, if the research is done at federal centers that simply exist for research rather than creating products, yes absolutely put it out for free immediately, so that it can get into products faster.

sidewndr46 4y ago
I'm pretty sure the US doesn't need a revolution in the federal government subsidizing private business ventures. We've got more than enough of that already. The idea of federal funding being verboten in the corporate world is more akin to an ideal state, rather than one to be avoided.
briffle 4y ago
Yep, that is how the Chinese government and industry has gotten so far ahead in Flow Batteries: https://www.opb.org/article/2022/08/03/the-u-s-made-a-breakthrough-battery-discovery-then-gave-the-technology-to-china/ https://www.opb.org/article/2022/08/03/the-u-s-made-a-breakt...
- boogies 4y ago
  The DoE didn’t free that tech to the public, the US government’s using licensing to actively prevent American companies from competing with the Chinese one they allowed a sublicense to be granted to (from your link): > Forever Energy, a Bellevue, Wash., based company, is one of several U.S. companies that have been trying to get a license from the Department of Energy to make the batteries. Joanne Skievaski, Forever Energy's chief financial officer, has been trying to get hold of a license for more than a year and called the department's decision to allow foreign manufacturing "mind boggling."

heavyset_go 4y ago

I feel the same about NIH funded research and development in the medical space.

hyperbovine 4y ago
NIH-funded research goes up on PubMed Central within 12 months of publication: https://www.nih.gov/health-information/nih-clinical-research-trials-you/what-is-nih-public-access-policy https://www.nih.gov/health-information/nih-clinical-research...
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  I meant with regard to the ability for anyone to use it without, say, violating patents. Plenty of drugs discovered and developed with NIH money go on to be patented by private companies.
  - hyperbovine 4y ago
    I take your point, but OTOH it's difficult to envision a world where drugs actually get brought to market without patent protection. The amount of money and risk involved is just astronomical.
    - heavyset_go 4y ago
      I'd be happy funding drug development, clinical trials, etc with public funds, as well. I also believe there are opportunities for companies to profit without being given exclusive manufacturing rights via patents.

TulliusCicero 4y ago

> 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? * No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time? * No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow * Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?

elliotec 4y ago
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.
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  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.
- vosper 4y ago
  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.

hyperbovine 4y ago

When was this? The NSF has had a 12-month open access policy in place for almost a decade now: https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16009/nsf16009.jsp#q1 https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16009/nsf16009.jsp#q1

librarianscott 4y ago
Now they are removing the 12-month post-publication embargo period for peer-reviewed manuscripts that result from federally funded scientific research. So, 12 months sooner.

majormajor 4y ago

Imagine if a VC putting in "one red cent" meant that the founders and employees in a new company couldn't capture any of the returns themselves... Why should the government be different than other investors here? Putting in money != doing the work. You have to have the funding, but you also have to have the work, and money alone doesn't guarantee success.

fphhotchips 4y ago
Your analogy fails because it's not the people doing work in science that are capturing the returns. It's a bunch of rent-seeking publishers whose entire business model is extortion. This is more like if a VC funded you, but Google said they wouldn't render your page in Chrome unless people paid them for access, and also you aren't allowed to take payment.

cmurf 4y ago

All those red cents going to proprietary software licensing... Lots of Windows licenses in the federal government.