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Comment by brianobush | Hacker News Reader

Taxpayers fund my research, so can they just break in and steal "information" (code, plots, draft of papers, etc)? They paid for it, right? The academic publishing industry is not one of my favorites, but they do provide a service to the communities they represent. Circumventing them will eventually destroy the community unless another "open" organization is willing to step in. Many fields (mine included) are so arcane that very few would be interested in making an open publishing venue with the editorial quality we have now.

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"Stealing" in the sense of depriving you access to the documents should be prohibited, but I see no problem if someone requested you immediately copy all of your research.

In fact this is exactly the case with anyone working directly for the federal government, doing research or otherwise. You're told in no uncertain terms that at any moment information on your work laptop can be FOIA'd in which case you will have to immediately hand over the contents of your hard drive (if it has been determined there is a reasonable likelihood that it contains the FOIA'd information). Obviously if you're working on classified state secrets the process is different (also personal information is redacted from the documents). There's no reason research can't be accomplished successfully given the condition that the public has a right to that information at any given moment.

> I see no problem if someone requested you immediately copy all of your research.

Academia can be extremely competitive. Like, if a competing lab got ahold even of the title of your upcoming paper, they would and do rush to duplicate your results, and try to publish before you to get the scoop.

For that reason, I don't know if open access to everyone's hard drives would work.

Perhaps it should be more cooperative.

I'd say "too bad" for slow researchers. If someone can reproduce your results and publish a quality paper before you, that is better for society.

Nobody gets to "own" an idea. This possessiveness and reputational greed is what is causing all of these problems.

In my experience as a researcher, this competitiveness and haste to publish leads very frequently to lower quality in the research. For a researcher's career is often more profitable to quickly publish a half-baked paper than ensuring that everything is correct and well explained. This is a quite difficult problem to solve.

The question here would be why should the public have to break in in the first place? Why isn't it public info from the start?

Agreed. Many times publicly funded projects are not entirely open, case in point: DoD funded work.

> Taxpayers fund my research, so can they just break in and steal "information" (code, plots, draft of papers, etc).

They should be allowed to make copies of it (in which case it isn't theft). They should not be allowed to deprive you of your copies of the information.

I don't mean this as an attack, but I think you're missing the point. First, I doubt you publish significant amounts of code in any published papers. I've read a number of Physics papers and I don't think I've seen more than two lines of code in them. Plots are a different matter, but they'll be highly visible if a paper gains any traction at all.

Second, the taxpayers did fund your research (assuming you research at a university), even if you had to work for that funding, and the results should be publicly available as default. Or can you provide a reason for why it shouldn't?

Personally, I'm biased even without the taxpayer argument since I believe in online learning (duolingo, OCW, etc.). I also know most published papers will only be skimmed at some later date by people highly involved in that field, and so having the information available to interested taxpayers doesn't seem to me to be an issue.

It does not follow that the destruction of the academic publishing industry will destroy the scientific community.

> Many fields (mine included) are so arcane that very few would be interested in making an open publishing venue with the editorial quality we have now.

What is your field? And why don't the members of this field just create their own on-line publishing venue?

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