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Information should be free. We subsidize scientific research to the tune of trillions of dollars—not to support to livelihood of grad students; not to create jo

Information should be free. We subsidize scientific research to the tune of trillions of dollars—not to support to livelihood of grad students; not to create jobs in the publishing industry; but on the theory the fruit of that research has planet-wide benefits. We throw money hand-over-fist at scientific research because we view that as investing in civilization. If we believe that, and we believe research progress builds on top of other research, then the conclusion is we ought to minimize the friction of discovering other groups' research results, and maximize their availability. Make the act of research as easy and painless as possible. Scientific research output should be free, universally, without hindrance. It's myopic to try extract wealth from this public good by siloing it, by toll-gating access to it. Like barricading a public highway with toll-booths every 500 meters: it's a myopia that's blind to the public-good value of infrastructure—a myopia of greed that's a universal drain on public wealth, for some petty local optimization. If you obstruct ML models on some financial profit theory, you're obstructing not only the ML entities; you're obstructing the thousand researchers downstream who stand to benefit from them. You're standing the in road blocking traffic, collecting tolls; you've not only stopped the vehicle in front of you, you've stopped a thousand more stranded behind it. It is a public nuisance.

kldrt 2y ago
That's kind of orthogonal to the issue here. Many academics would not mind if their research is free. They do mind very much if some entity takes their research and republishes it without attribution.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Why is that orthogonal? If their research is truly free then everyone has permission to republish it all the time. If it was done with public funds then it belongs in the public domain, and if it's in the public domain then everyone can do everything they want with it. If they're not comfortable with that, then they aren't comfortable with their research being free-as-in-freedom.
  - PhilipRoman 2y ago
    Do you not consider MIT licensed software "truly free"? Note the important part: "without attribution".
    - lolinder 2y ago
      Not free enough for publicly-funded research. I don't think copyright should apply at all to research that taxpayers paid for, it should instantly be public domain.
      - Delk 2y ago
        Irrespective of copyright, the moral right to attribution is central in all kinds of academic research. I agree that research information should be free of paywalls but that doesn't remove concerns about proper attribution. You can think that researchers shouldn't expect attribution either. I'd disagree, but in any case, removing that would significantly change the implicit social contract of academic research. Journal publishers and tech companies shouldn't be able to do that unilaterally.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        That's a great way to remove incentives for future researchers to pursue acedemia instead of pitching their projects to Microsoft directly. Or for private schools to hoard all the best researchers. I don't really agree on the hard line of "information should be free", but the first step to that ordeal isn't to remove incentives from creators. If creators didn't have to fear for being left in the dirt by corporations after having a breakthrough, we wouldn't need copyright to begin with.
sseagull 2y ago
> We subsidize scientific research to the tune of trillions of dollars Do you have a citation for that? Annual budget of the NSF is about $8 billion, covering all of science. Total NIH is $45 billion, and that includes other things. DOE Office of Science is about $8 billion. I think both of those cover a vast majority of grants funded in academia. I suppose if you factor in some sort of tax breaks you could increase that, but I doubt you would get to trillions. (I say this because I feel people drastically overestimate the amount of funding science gets in the US. For example, compare the above numbers with the profits of big tech companies)
- poincaredisk 2y ago
  >I think both of those cover a vast majority of grants funded in academia In the US. Also even in the US, is NASA included in one of those? Looks like it costs around 20B yearly. There may be more from the US, and then there's, you know, the rest of the world combined too.
- sigmoid10 2y ago
  Those are just government programs (and even there it's missing a lot). Most research in the US is funded by the industry nowadays. But you can still easily make the case that the US government alone spent more than one trillion dollars on research in the last decade, even without looking at other countries [1]. And the EU spends a lot on the federal government level as well. [1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/may/rd-business-spending-up-government-spending-flat https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/may/rd-busine...
93po 2y ago
From the article: >"We are at a crossroads in the production and dissemination of research knowledge, and in my view the biggest problem with this deal is the reduction of academic research into raw content from which data can be extracted and repackaged as knowledge," Clemens said. I'm sorry, what? The problem researchers have is their research being used as a resource for general knowledge? Do they only want their research to be helpful for other research and never have applicability outside academia?
skybrian 2y ago
The books themselves aren’t free, though scholars might get free access through a library.
matrix87 2y ago
> myopia of greed that's a universal drain on public wealth, for some petty local optimization. It's all a question of who gets to do this first, until then everyone who doesn't gatekeep is a sucker. You think M$ won't do this?

kldrt 2y ago

That's kind of orthogonal to the issue here. Many academics would not mind if their research is free. They do mind very much if some entity takes their research and republishes it without attribution.

lolinder 2y ago
Why is that orthogonal? If their research is truly free then everyone has permission to republish it all the time. If it was done with public funds then it belongs in the public domain, and if it's in the public domain then everyone can do everything they want with it. If they're not comfortable with that, then they aren't comfortable with their research being free-as-in-freedom.
- PhilipRoman 2y ago
  Do you not consider MIT licensed software "truly free"? Note the important part: "without attribution".
  - lolinder 2y ago
    Not free enough for publicly-funded research. I don't think copyright should apply at all to research that taxpayers paid for, it should instantly be public domain.
    - Delk 2y ago
      Irrespective of copyright, the moral right to attribution is central in all kinds of academic research. I agree that research information should be free of paywalls but that doesn't remove concerns about proper attribution. You can think that researchers shouldn't expect attribution either. I'd disagree, but in any case, removing that would significantly change the implicit social contract of academic research. Journal publishers and tech companies shouldn't be able to do that unilaterally.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      That's a great way to remove incentives for future researchers to pursue acedemia instead of pitching their projects to Microsoft directly. Or for private schools to hoard all the best researchers. I don't really agree on the hard line of "information should be free", but the first step to that ordeal isn't to remove incentives from creators. If creators didn't have to fear for being left in the dirt by corporations after having a breakthrough, we wouldn't need copyright to begin with.

sseagull 2y ago

> We subsidize scientific research to the tune of trillions of dollars Do you have a citation for that? Annual budget of the NSF is about $8 billion, covering all of science. Total NIH is $45 billion, and that includes other things. DOE Office of Science is about $8 billion. I think both of those cover a vast majority of grants funded in academia. I suppose if you factor in some sort of tax breaks you could increase that, but I doubt you would get to trillions. (I say this because I feel people drastically overestimate the amount of funding science gets in the US. For example, compare the above numbers with the profits of big tech companies)

poincaredisk 2y ago
>I think both of those cover a vast majority of grants funded in academia In the US. Also even in the US, is NASA included in one of those? Looks like it costs around 20B yearly. There may be more from the US, and then there's, you know, the rest of the world combined too.
sigmoid10 2y ago
Those are just government programs (and even there it's missing a lot). Most research in the US is funded by the industry nowadays. But you can still easily make the case that the US government alone spent more than one trillion dollars on research in the last decade, even without looking at other countries [1]. And the EU spends a lot on the federal government level as well. [1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/may/rd-business-spending-up-government-spending-flat https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2018/may/rd-busine...

93po 2y ago

From the article: >"We are at a crossroads in the production and dissemination of research knowledge, and in my view the biggest problem with this deal is the reduction of academic research into raw content from which data can be extracted and repackaged as knowledge," Clemens said. I'm sorry, what? The problem researchers have is their research being used as a resource for general knowledge? Do they only want their research to be helpful for other research and never have applicability outside academia?

skybrian 2y ago

The books themselves aren’t free, though scholars might get free access through a library.

matrix87 2y ago

> myopia of greed that's a universal drain on public wealth, for some petty local optimization. It's all a question of who gets to do this first, until then everyone who doesn't gatekeep is a sucker. You think M$ won't do this?