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Comment by heycosmo | Hacker News Reader

Yes, of course. When I write "pay me to publish" I don't mean "cover the costs of publication", I mean "fund my work".

Wouldn't publishing results showing your methods offer benefit attract future funding?

Certainly. It also helps a resume. And if that is the only value to the work, then so be it. But there is a reason why R&D departments and universities publish AND protect generated IP. They want returns on investment. In my case, I invested in myself. Why shouldn't I play this game?

Universities don't do research. Individuals affiliated with the university do. The usual deal is that the individuals own the results. If they want to commercialize the results, then the university (and possibly the funders) get a share. But the vast majority of academics don't do that, because commercialization attempts mean certain bureaucracy and uncertain gains. Most just want to talk about their results freely. Many even talk about preliminary work and preliminary results openly to make it less likely that the eventual results will be patentable.

Out of curiosity, what level of $ amount are you talking about?

6-7 figures. IDK if this is realistic, but it seems reasonable to me considering the cost and risk involved in reproducing this work from scratch (salary/benefits/overhead for a research group or individual; no guarantee of success), and the impact of the work (admittedly I am biased to think it's important). I have seen 6- to 7-figure gov't grants for projects (in a similar space) that I guarantee are lower impact.

Usually funding agencies do not fund people with no track record of publishing. If you haven't published your results (or even any prior work) publicly before, why do you expect companies to fund you?

I have a history of publishing in computational physics. But that's beside the point. I have an exciting new result in digital signal processing and I would like to get retroactively funded for the work. If researchers can get funded for future work, why not award past work that comes with a guaranteed outcome?

Payments for making past discoveries public create terrible incentives. They encourage you to keep your discoveries secret until someone is willing to pay enough for them. If your discovery is not particularly valuable on its own, but someone else could make a breakthrough building on it, that breakthrough won't happen, because the other person does not know about your result.

Patents, while also terrible, are a better model. They at least require you to disclose the invention first, and then it's up to you if you can take advantage of your temporary monopoly. While practical impact may be lagging due to reduced commercial interested during the monopoly, the result is at least public, and other people can build on it.

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