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Comment by onemorepassword | Hacker News Reader

an organization dedicated, not to maximize profits for shareholders, but to keep power over scientific research in people’s hands

That's why we have governments.

No, I'm not being sarcastic. The public sector is there to serve the public good, and this is quite obviously a public good. I'm not anti-privatization either. Private exploitation under public laws and guidelines is a common strategy to solve these issues.

What has undermined public/private solutions is not public opinion or political ideology, but greed, lobbying and corruption. A foundation is nothing but a workaround, and foundations have a history of getting corrupted by the greed and delusions of grandure of its administrators.

It's time we address the real problem. The legacy of thousands of years of civilization is being stolen from us.

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I appreciate where you're coming from. But do you really trust, say, Sarah Palin to oversee evolutionary biology research? Exxon to have veto power over climate change articles? Todd Akin to be able to interfere in STD epidemiology?

The open source movement has shown that there's a third way, and I suspect that that's the way to go. It's fault tolerant: if a group of people are detracting from its mission, the others can very easily go on and continue as is.

Science is more expensive than software, though, and therein lies the rub.

Science is already funded, in very large part, by the federal government (in the US). The research is already subject to political pressures, here we're just talking about the (much smaller) amount that goes towards publications. Federal grants are going to fund research, the results of which are locked up behind the paywalls of proprietary journals (grant dollars even pay for the privilege of publishing in some journals). Publications by federal employees are already required by law to be in the public domain. It's time we look at doing the same for the results of federally funded research.

This is exactly what I'm working on. Also, publications by federally funded grants are required to be made public as well (for 1 year). However, even doing that, you are still stuck behind the political pressures, journal bias, and the peer review system which...for a lack of a better term, sucks.

Science needs to be transparent and made available in real time. This is the whole purpose of science, to freely distribute knowledge for the well being of humanity. I honestly believe that and I'm working to bring that transparency to science as we speak.

> Publications by federal employees are already required by law to be in the public domain. It's time we look at doing the same for the results of federally funded research.

Yes, this needs to happen. NIH already requires that publications arising from NIH-funded research be made publicly available 12 months after publication (http://publicaccess.nih.gov/). Other funding organizations really need to do this. IMHO, they should also require that publications be made publicly available immediately upon acceptance and provide incentives for "gold" open access (where the article is immediately made available on the publisher's website).

Other federal research orgs are ramping up now -> http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us-white-house-announce...

> The open source movement has shown that there's a third way, and I suspect that that's the way to go. It's fault tolerant: if a group of people are detracting from its mission, the others can very easily go on and continue as is.

You can't fork funding the way you fork source code though. It's not just more expensive, but fundamentally different.

You can't fork funding, but I'm thinking that we're talking about forking content. If the Wikimedia Foundation decided to go in a direction people didn't like, it would be possible to fork all of their content and start your own competing wiki (bring your own funding, of course).

Of course, but that does nothing to take power over research away from the likes of Sarah Palin and Todd Akin.

Sarah Palin wouldn't stand a chance in hell in mature democracy that hasn't been corrupted by the power of money.

Palin is a sock puppet for those with the money, and the people voting for the likes of her have been deliberately deprived of a decent education. This is a symptom of the same corruption.

The open source movement is a workaround, exploiting a flaw in a corrupted system. It should serve as an example of how much better things can be, not as an excuse to never address the problem, especially not when millions are being criminalized by exactly the same copyright system for the simple act of sharing.

It's not fault tolerant: changes in the copyright law (the laws bought and paid for) can kill copyleft, and whatever license one may prefer, copyleft upholds some of the essential pillars of the open source ecosystem.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all in favor of pragmatically using these workarounds.

But I'm also in favor of keeping our eyes on the prize: the knowledge accumulated over millennia should not be allowed to be monopolized and exploited by the few.

Open source is not a "third way". It's a necessary detour.

"...and the people voting for the likes of her have been deliberately deprived of a decent education."

I really wish this were the case, but political views remain relatively static in the face of increasing levels of education. (see: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/college-doe... )

Unfortunately, even if we sent all the Palin-voters to college, they would still probably be convinced that Obama is a muslim, earth is 5,000 years old, etc etc. It's rather depressing to think about, since there appears to be no cure for it.

> It's time we address the real problem.

The real problem is that some companies manage to exploit a monopoly granted to them by the government in ways that are not pleasing to the public. The government is the entity which created the problem. Granted, while solving another but it will still be the government agents who break down your door and arrest you if you build an unauthorized competitor or even just try to release that "legacy" (vide Aaron Swartz), not Elsevier's.

It's hard for me to understand how you can blame a company that puts up a paywall more than people using violence (or at least credible threats of it) who enforce the rules stopping others from competing.

There's a difference between a for-profit company with a government-backed monopoly, and a not-for-profit organisation with government support (of which there are already many examples).

I don't think anyone here blames companies for putting up a paywall or doing something else to maximise their profits; it's why they exist. However, we do recognise that this is not always an ideal state of affairs. A public sector body is one way to remove the profit requirement; private-sector not-for-profit organisations are also a possibility (but have to worry more about where their funding comes from).

So you're arguing that because the government has a monopoly on force, anything bad that happens anywhere in the US is their fault because it's their guns backing up the law?

Laws happen because a variety of agents (lobbyists, legislators, public interest groups) push for them. They're not enacted by some amorphous specter of 'government'.

> The government is the entity which created the problem.

And it acts as an extension of "the people" as the entity providing oversight and regulation in this example as well. That it doesn't happen in real life is evidence of subversion of an ideal, rather than some inherent truth.

> It's hard for me to understand how you can blame a company that puts up a paywall more than people using violence (or at least credible threats of it) who enforce the rules stopping others from competing

Because we're not 15 year olds who just read Atlas Shrugged?

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