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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

It's categorically different. The arrow is in the opposite direction. The tech industry's private siloed stacks are built on top of that public infrastructure and are an elaboration of it. Whereas the publishing industry's walled gardens are the foundation upon which public research is built.

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It's the same.

Publishers are the "gateway" to science, and they have cornered that market, using publicly funded science.

Google is the "gateway" to search, built largely using publicly funded science. Facebook is the gateway to online social interaction, and is again built largely using publicly funded science. Et cetera.

The content in Google and much of it in Facebook is discoverable via those services, but exist outside of it.

Publishers are not mere discovery services - they are gatekeepers, not portals.

"built using publicly funded..." Is not the relevant direction. You'll come to absurd conclusions. A building in San Francisco is literally built using publicly funded safety science, and materials science, etc. Should we then force it to be free to access?

A building is not information, in the sense that you cannot freely copy it.

Well, things are a bit different in the US where your universities are privately funded but in many countries the publishing industry publishes research from researchers employed by state funded institutions and sells the research back to libraries in state funded institutions. So, really they're being doubly financed by the state.

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