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Seems a reasonable use of NSF money to me, to promote sciences by creating a common infrastructure for organizing the world's library of preprints. It's infrast
by perihelions 3y ago
Seems a reasonable use of NSF money to me, to promote sciences by creating a common infrastructure for organizing the world's library of preprints. It's infrastructure of a sorts, and civil government is the ideal party to fund civil infrastructure. (Isn't it?) Not random FAANG's, and I don't see why they'd want to anyway—what they'd get out of it.
FAANG's aren't charities; anything they do that looks philanthropic is some kind of trap.
- choppaface 3y agoI’m not saying it isn’t a bad use of NSF funds, I’m saying that especially in the AI space that industry use of arXiv is large enough that taxpayers deserve to have industry foot the bill.
- lkbm 3y agoI favor the "company pays tax, tax funds science infrastructure", cycle, not the "company funds science infrastructure" cycle. It reduces the risk of industry asserting influence over the infrastructure. Whether companies pay enough tax is a separate discussion, but they paid some taxes, and those taxes are now funding ArXiv. This seems like a good setup.
- perihelions 3y agoBut I think you have it backwards: public infrastructure exists to make it easy for industry to thrive, to create low-friction business environments. We like industry, and we want more of it. The US benefits from AI companies headquartering in its borders far more than the AI companies benefit from "freeloading" off of arxiv.org server costs. And let's not lose perspective: the stuff posted on arxiv.org is collectively like a million times more valuable than the servers themselves.