Public money should always mean public access. Not just for journals, but for anything. If one red cent of taxpayer money goes to it, the taxpayer should get it for free. Hopefully the trend continues.
Example: John Adler received some government funding to develop Cyberknife (image-guided radiation therapy). But he couldn't get follow up funding to commercialize this revolutionary new technology. So he took out a second mortgage on his house to commercialize the invention. And now image-guided radiation therapy is a standard treatment for many types of cancer. There's no way he would have taken out that large personal loan, if he didn't own the intellectual property.
There's a large gap between a patent, and a commercially viable product. And if you showed the patent to "experts" in the field, they would likely tell you that it's worthless. Great ideas are only obvious in retrospect. The inventor has the vision, motivation, and knowledge to make their invention a reality, but they can't quit their job and get external funding, if they can't own their invention.
That is plenty of latitude for seeding start-ups and commercializing technology. There is no need to lock up the actual research so that only the researcher and their university can commercialize it, protected from competition. It does a disservice to the people who's money paid for the research behind it.
I wouldn't go this far. Part of the current revolution in the private space industry is precisely allowing companies to own products that were partially funded by taxpayer dollars. As it encourages companies to fund their own money into it, rather than simply relying 100% on government funding.
Further if the government wants to encourage some industry, by using tax dollars to fund it they would instead destroy that industry. Many companies would end up simply refusing government grants because they know they could never profitably sell it if it would simply be copied. Or they would charge the government significantly more for the product.
Now yes, if the research is done at federal centers that simply exist for research rather than creating products, yes absolutely put it out for free immediately, so that it can get into products faster.
> Forever Energy, a Bellevue, Wash., based company, is one of several U.S. companies that have been trying to get a license from the Department of Energy to make the batteries. Joanne Skievaski, Forever Energy's chief financial officer, has been trying to get hold of a license for more than a year and called the department's decision to allow foreign manufacturing "mind boggling."
And non taxpayers should not get it at all.
https://www.nih.gov/health-information/nih-clinical-research...
The USG spent $6B on cloud computing in 2020. That number is increasing quickly. To say nothing of the massive quantities of non-OSS software that the government buys and incorporates into is own business-critical processes. And it's not just government licenses, but also anyone who interacts with the government. E.g., try interacting with any government agency without an Office 365 license.
You get really funny looks if you say that MSFT should have to give away Office 365 for free if the government is going to use it for anything.
But total USG spend on closed-source software has to be well into the 30B-50B range conservatively. For reference, the entire NSF budget is $10B.
The main reason for this is that there are many monied and powerful stakeholders who benefit from selling closed software to USG, whereas the academic publishers a tiny, often not even American-owned, and got super greedy and screwed their natural contingency (academics hate them as much as or more than anyone else).
Say I'm vulture capitalist Tom, and I pay a few gajillion dollars to developer Gupta to create a product for me. I would be understandably pissed if Gupta turned around and sold that same product to competitor vc Janet. She didn't pay for that dev work, I did.
2. With respect to R&D, one big difference is that the government doesn't provide seed funding. They provide grants. If the government wanted equity in research labs, they'd have to pay a lot more. You'll see this in practice if you ever have the extreme displeasure of doing non-useless research in academia. Companies that insist on IP ownership/sharing end up paying much higher premiums for university research contracts. Repealing Bayh-Dole would have no effect on the accessibility of actually useful research; universities and companies would privately fund the useful stuff and leave the government to fund the labs of politically-connected/twitter-famous but otherwise totally useless academics.
(To be clear: we're on the same side here with respect to open access publications.)
In regards to your explanation in [2], that sucks - I kinda figured that's how things were but I sorta went around academia rather than through it so it's interesting to hear. Any hot ideas about how it could be fixed?
For Computer Science:
1. replace the current academic funding model with pure fellowships. Each individual, from most junior to most senior, gets their own N year funding.
2. Each has a legal entity under which their IP lives and in which the government takes a small, fair, non-voting share.
3. Completely divorce this funding infrastructure from universities -- if someone wants to use part of their grant to pay for PhD courses/advising, great, but make it so that funding science is not contingent on that institutional apparatus.
For lab sciences things are more complicated.
And there's lots of useful software the government wants to buy that is closed source.
DARPA is probably the best-known route and funds a lot of academic and corporate research (including, for a while, me).
The DoD also has a bunch of other grant-making programs (Office of Naval Research, Congressionally-directed Medical Research Program, etc) and also labs that directly do research themselves. The Air Force has a big research center (AFRL) in Ohio; the army has one in Maryland (ARL), and the Navy has one in DC (NRL). There are loads of other sites as well: the army has a night vision research lab in New Jersey, for example, and the Navy has some marine mammal stuff on the West Coast.
A lot of this work--even the stuff done at DoD labs--winds up in open literature. By policy all of that is supposed to be publicly available, so you can browse it here https://discover.dtic.mil/products-services/.
Do you mean researchers employed by the military? Otherwise, basically half of every STEM professor I encountered had funding via some branch of the military.
But separately there is classified research that isn't published.
Take a new program like "FELIX" - simplifying ways of checking for bioengineered threats.
IARPA funds that, and the research funded through that program can be found here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C47&q=N66...
From the look of it they funded 9 companies and institutions to do the research and their poster presentations can be found at the bottom of [1].
Freedom of information is a direct extension of the Declaration of Independence.
The tarrif is not paid by the exporter.
The goal of a tariff is to _increase_ the customer price for some good locally, and thus make a local (more expensive) good more compeditive.
A foreign country may experience lower demand for their product, but its not like they "pay any money".
Yes, lower demand may lead to a lower price, or it may mean they export to other countries instead.
I see no problem with publicly funded stuff being available world-wide. But given the choice between nothing or taxpayer only, the taxpayer should get first dibs.
Why should the government be different than other investors here? Putting in money != doing the work. You have to have the funding, but you also have to have the work, and money alone doesn't guarantee success.
This is more like if a VC funded you, but Google said they wouldn't render your page in Chrome unless people paid them for access, and also you aren't allowed to take payment.
This logic only works for easily-replicable goods, like information. It falls apart when you consider various goods and service that are not easily replicable, or where increased demand can mean increased funding is necessary. E.g.:
* So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?
* No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?
* No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow
* Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
The infrastructure isn't paid for when it's built (including the public house). It's financed on debt. Pay-by-use is just a form of tax payment.
It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage.
If the road was already completely paid for by tax-payers (no debt), and then a toll company wanted to operate the road for a 99% margin - you'd see a lot more people complaining about that.
Street parking is an interesting example in that the demand charge is probably unrelated to the underlying cost. However, it's just one of the many examples of taking tax dollars from Pot A to pay for things in Pot B.
Sorry, I don't understand the relevance here.
> It's just that the "use" for information is nearly free, so it doesn't make sense to charge for usage.
Exactly. It's easy to provide the information to essentially infinite people for free, and there's no real downside to doing so.
> If the road was already completely paid for by tax-payers (no debt), and then a toll company wanted to operate the road for a 99% margin - you'd see a lot more people complaining about that.
For sure. Of course, real world charges for roads/parking is a little more complicated than that.
> Street parking is an interesting example in that the demand charge is probably unrelated to the underlying cost. However, it's just one of the many examples of taking tax dollars from Pot A to pay for things in Pot B.
Yeah, the most obvious reason to do this for street parking is because you actively want to manage demand of a highly demanded, finite resource. You don't really need the money, but charging gets you other changes you want. Ditto for congestion charges.
There's no legitimate downside to doing so. There is a very real illegitimate downside for copyright racketeers such as Elsevier, in that they would be much less able to engage in said racketeering.
Also as a disincentive to use something. Like we want people to drive less in the urban core to reduce congestion and also the air pollution that's killing thousands of people every year. So we're going to put a charge on using those roads.
Then you also end up with people spending a lot of time circling around downtown looking for elusive free parking, which is bad for both traffic and the environment. In contrast, charging a "market rate" that usually leaves 10-15% of parking spots open means that scenario is now transparent and fast: you know you can usually quickly find parking, you know how much it's gonna cost, you can make the calculation ahead of time and execute fast.
> * So public housing can't be at least partially paid for by the tenant, it must be completely free?
Depends on what you consider as payment. I'm in favor of temporary housing (e.g. a tenant is expected to stay in the area no more than five years) being owned and managed by the city in which it's located. "Rent" would go toward maintenance of the building and surrounds, with any extra going back toward city services. Rent could be offset by a number of things - tenant's physical contribution to the maintenance, stipends for public service (e.g. teacher, social workers, etc.), federal grants, etc. The city would be expected to keep rents low. Maintenance could be handled by parks and rec. This is, of course, all dependent on how the city is set up, but I like it as a model.
Permanent housing would also be handled by the city, but only in terms of building and selling. Developers and real estate agents have a LOT of incentive to keep housing prices climbing. Putting this in the hands of the city - not the state, not the feds - has greater potential to help influence positive growth with citizen input while reigning in costs.
The part I have not solved for here is situations like Atherton, which is heavily populated by rich white weirdos who would rather no one other than their own live there, and actively work to discriminate against "undesirables" moving to their city (see the recent hullabaloo there regarding affordable housing). On the one hand, if that's what their democratically elected city government is pushing for, and the citizens agree, that's basically democracy at work. But you can't ignore the folks who are being left behind and simply make them the "problem" of the next city over.
> * No bridge or road tolls anywhere, any time?
Nope. Tax the companies that ship goods on those roads and bridges fairly and you'll recoup those costs. As should the fees for vehicle licensing.
> * No paid street parking either, even in highly demanded areas, like the middle of big cities, where demand needs to be managed somehow
Nope. Parking is self-managed - if there's no spot, you can't park. Adding money only fills the coffers of the local government, it doesn't really do much to actually address the issue. You may argue that the money could go toward adding more parking structures, but I'd argue back it's wiser to build cities that don't rely so heavily on motorized transit for access. The more parking we add, the less room we have for things like homes and small, locally owned businesses.
> Any kind of license or permit or passport should all be free, even for businesses?
Licensing and passports and all that aren't public goods - they're methods of tax collection, authentication (license ID, passport) and authorization (you need a passport to travel internationally). The fees you pay for them are what ought to ultimately be paying for those services (in addition, yes, to the other taxes we collect).
> Putting this in the hands of the city - not the state, not the feds - has greater potential to help influence positive growth with citizen input while reigning in costs.
I'm leery of this; cities have generally shown themselves to be easily swayed by NIMBY's when it comes to housing policy. Just look at how California the state is constantly trying to get cities to build more housing semi-willingly through their local policies, and how pretty much all the coastal cities (who are the same sort of liberals elected to state-wide office, mind) just ignore that and do their best to do the bare minimum.
> Tax the companies that ship goods on those roads and bridges fairly and you'll recoup those costs.
Why though? Like, why is doing taxes on companies superior to, say, general/road tax funds + bridge tolls?
I'm open to the idea of making things free to the user, but I'm not so dogmatic as to think it's the right answer 100% of the time.
> The fees you pay for them are what ought to ultimately be paying for those services (in addition, yes, to the other taxes we collect).
Right, and I'm saying that this reasoning can apply to other things as well. Just because something is at least partially paid for by tax funds somewhere doesn't mean it should have zero cost to the user (though certainly sometimes that's true).
I think this is more of an issue of the GP not having explained why they believe a single cent of public money should mean zero cost for use.
Yes, but nevertheless money works better than not doing anything for stuff like street parking. It's simple and effective. Perhaps another system would work better on paper for allocating street parking, but I'm guessing most other suggestions would be a lot more complicated and brittle in practice.