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So, what's the alternative to paying for science? We fund it either out of philanthropy, or taxes. I think we know we can't fund all of the world's scientific endeavors on philanthropy alone.

This is where things get a bit selfish: everyone likes science. Everyone benefits from it. But, to what extent do we make the subsidization of scientific efforts compulsory?

Some people just want to live their life and die happy. Not everyone wants to pay for mars rovers. At this point, I expect a bunch of science lovers to get emotional and downvote my post.

If you can't fully fund science out of philanthropy, then it will be behind a paywall. Who'd have thought you need to pay for some of the most valuable information on the Earth? Wow.

People will pay for a half-assed book on PHP, but if you want to sell a journal on astrophysics the internet gets all riled up about it.

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Actually the issue is that we're currently paying for it twice. Once to fund the research, and then again to read the journal. The actual scientist doesn't get any part of the second cost; only the publishing company does.

I see. That is an excellent point. The internet is supposed to enable scientists to share this information for free (that's what it was for, right)

Well, scientists do share information for free - they can, and do, just post it to their websites or a preprint archive like ArXiv.

> People will pay for a half-assed book on PHP

This is an interesting tangent, and just as a corellary, I don't anymore. I find online sample code and community wikis a lot more engrossing and knowledgeable than single authors writing 300 page tomes of dead tree. Knowledge bases like the java and python documentation, qt developers wiki, etc are all much more useful tools for learning new languages, frameworks, etc than a big book on it, and I find wikipedia articles and Stack Overflow answers better explanations of broader concepts like variable capture or shared memory than a book on it conveys.

So I'm not buying books. I read a bunch in college (off the shelf in the CS lab), and a few were great, but I find myself getting much more out of collaborative online works than one mans ideas of the right way to do things (even when they have a dozen editors for reviewing).

But more on topic, and in a broader sense, I think we have finally reduced the cost of information to such an insignificant quantity that writing such books usually isn't a profitable endeavor. It takes radical success selling knowledge on dead tree to make back the time investment to write it all down, and people like myself won't even consider it because people will freely give their knowledge in smaller chunks (usually, there are plenty of books online for free, like Python the Hard Way) that the "industry" of selling knowledge is collapsing, in a good way. The challenge now is organizing the absurd amount of information generated into useful knowledge rather than actively adding more to the pile. It is a distribution problem now, not a creation one.

>If you can't fully fund science out of philanthropy, then it will be behind a paywall. Who'd have thought you need to pay for some of the most valuable information on the Earth? Wow.

>People will pay for a half-assed book on PHP, but if you want to sell a journal on astrophysics the internet gets all riled up about it.

Those examples are not analogous at all. Research isn't funded through the subscription fees to the journals, it's funded through tuition (via faculty salaries) and grants.

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