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Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

If you want to change a system, understand its motivations.

The article supplies a half-truth in this regard:

"If you're a scientist applying for a job or a grant, the biggest factor determining your success will be your record of scientific publications."

That's true, but the larger story is "IP"

A friend of mine has spent the past 8 years barely scraping by earning a PhD in Chemistry and working as a post-doc.

His motivation for the investment of time and energy is entrepreneurial: he plans to start a business using his discoveries.

Protecting his business interests means patents, means a closed system, means secrecy until it comes time to publish and he can be assured prior art status.

Beyond that an enormous part of Universities funding comes from IP royalties.

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"Protecting his business interests"

Who funds his research? If he is funding it out of his own pocket then yes, I think it would be fair for him to have some joint ownership of the IP. However, if it was funded by someone else (e.g. the public) then my view is that everyone who contributed to funding that research should have the ability to access and use the results.

It is not really clear-cut. Typically a graduate student in the US does many things (from teaching to building a lab's basic equipment), and gets paid very little. I would not have a problem if a grad student claims that she did enough work for the money she is paid and her "discoveries" are the outcome of things she has done in her spare time. She is expected to publish of course, but there is already a remedy for not publishing: You cannot get a job in academia, and your advisor will not get further funding.

The funding provides the raw materials and the equipment in addition to the grad students' salary, so it is not unreasonable for the funding agency to require some open access to the outcome of the project. But this has to be said in advance, so people can decide whether to live on a low salary for many years while doing highly qualified work. If you want full access to my findings, so I would not be accumulating intellectual capital during my grad student years, then I would like a decent salary.

>>if it was funded by someone else (e.g. the public) then my view is that everyone who contributed to funding that research should have the ability to access and use the results.

If you show those results to "the public", they'll likely want their money back. I know I do.

That is pretty much the center of the debate: since that funding comes like an investment for research (think angel funds), shouldn't a greater of such return be given back as intellectual products?

I really don't know if the current return of those IP portfolios are enough to offset the money required to be poured in to the research community. Given that every government on the earth still need to subsidy many researches, it is pretty likely that the system are simply losing money.

We all know the incentive/motivation part of psychology, that if researchers get nothing in return (justifiable salaries or IP rights) they won't work as hard to solve the problems. The point of balance, given the current status of capitalism is really hard to redefine.

We always hear companies started by members from previously government/university funded projects. The public should be more informed for the process of how that company would pay back the researching funding the research projects have spent on, and the risk inferred for sponsoring any researches.

Sounds like VCs, but that's how it should go.

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