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US moves to make federally funded research free upon publication
- marviel 4y agoGood! So it will be as it should always have been.
- rogerkirkness 4y agoGratis versus libre.
- dang 4y agoGuidance to make federally funded research freely available without delay - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32596182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32596182 - Aug 2022 (266 comments)
- photochemsyn 4y agoThis isn't really the issue - it's that patents arising from federally funded research that really matter, the intellectual property created by researchers who are paid by federal agencies and taxpayer funds. The fundamental problem is that the universities and researchers can exclusively license that IP to private parties (under Bayh-Dole, passed in the 1980s). A more rational approach would be to allow any private party (possibly excluding foreign corporations) to license any patent generated, even in part, by federal funding. This would mean, for example, that any pharmaceutical manufacturer could start producing mRNA vaccines and a wide variety of other artificially price-inflated drugs. Hence, the simple solution is complete repeal of Bayh-Dole laws and an executive order to universities to grant IP liceneses to any interested private party.
- politician 4y agoThe different treatments of patents and federally funded research has always been shocking to me. In the one case, a private party pays the government for a limited monopoly on a novel idea and the government makes the patent publicly available. In the other case, the government pays for the research, the authors pay for publication, the authors’ peers review the work for free, and Elsiever gets the rights to paywall it forever at 10000% markup over S3 storage costs.