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Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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