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Comment by paul_f | Hacker News Reader

Without taking a side in the discussion, we should make a distinction between the research and the subsequent paper. The government funding is for the research. Scholarly papers are created for publication, not to meet the requirements of the research funding.

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That would be unpractical. You already cannot copyright the ideas (the research). You can patent it, but the issue addressed here is specifically copyright.

The thing is, for the last hundred years or so, publications have been the communication channel about research, so the two are often conflated (for the most part) - most importantly in science evaluation, which is where the money comes from, so research without publishing is not incentivized at all.

That doesn't seem like a practical distinction. If eg. a grant is to "promote the progress of science" on some topic, then accepting that the research is communicated only on posters, in narrow circles, or orally would not seem to fulfill the purpose of the grant (compared to full, written publication, available for everyone to read).

This isn't an important distinction to the research process up until a paper is accepted for publication, so perhaps asserting ownership of any eventual publications in the grant's terms is a minimally disruptive way to bring publications into the public domain. Already it's the case that researchers conduct research and agencies award grants with the intent that any useful or interesting results will be published, so I don't see any material changes happening in research itself if this "loophole" were closed.

i think the purpose of government funding is both for research and a public communication of its effects. is it not the effects (a carefully designed text / 'publication') we should share with the stakeholders? a public mandate is a reasonable strategy for sustaining quality research, in contrast to a money wall filter system.

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