Should you have to pay to see research your taxes paid for?

Government funded research is one way of transferring the risk of product development from business to the tax payer. If the research succeeds in creating a marketable product, the taxpayer return on the investment is the opportunity to pay for it as a consumer. In many cases, but certainly not all cases, the end result is a publication, ownership of which is transferred to a commercial scientific publishing company.

In many disciplines, not only scientific, academics have decided that it makes more sense to publish their own journals electronically. Open source systems like the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal System, together with freely available text processing systems such as LaTex make the transition from commercial publication to open source publication straightforward and inexpensive. Academics already have considerable experience writing, editing and refereeing academic publications for no pay for commercial enterprises, which generally demand the copyright in return for publication.

Editorial boards have been frustrated by concerns over ownership and pricing of the journals they edit. Some boards have decided to quit working for commercial publishers and form their own journals, taking their experience and prestige with them.

But who gets to own tax-payer funded journal publications is the tip of the economic iceberg.

The Man will come and get me for saying this: look at virtually any government grant application. You'll find a section that reads (more or less), "if the research results will be transferred to a corporation, enter the name and address of the corporation below." It looks innocuous enough, but it isn't. It means that you can use government funds to pay for research and development, and transfer anything profitable to a corporation--no questions asked. The tax-payer might get the opportunity to pay as the ultimate consumer for some product his dollars helped to finance, but all the profit will have gone to some corporation.

If this fact is pointed out, it's often excused as "the only system we have"; or "the benefit to the consumer in the form of new products and services is compensation enough"--a matter for politics to decide; or else the implied critique of the inequity is attacked as socialist, as if the spectrum of economic alternatives consisted of precisely two points: capitalism and communism. But a more equitable system could be envisioned, in which tax-payer funded capital gains are shared with the tax payer and corporations.

Imagine if one approached YC for seed money with the following proposition: Paul Graham and his crew would invest in your startup. However, YC would not receive a portion of the company; instead YC would benefit by being given the opportunity to pay, as an end consumer like everyone else, for whatever product or service your startup developed. If you could get this deal, it would be irrational not to take it. And the raw end of that deal is what the public gets with the current tax-payer funded research and development scheme.

Erdos2 makes some good, interesting, points but I wonder how often that section on a grant form asking if the research results will be transferred to a corporation is used? How easy would it be to get this through peer review? I suspect that under current funding conditions, very difficult unless the company was supplying serious cash and unique expertise. If I was sat on a review panel and saw a proposal saying that "This work will be great but we will not publish it and everything will belong to company X", my response would be "Why isn't X paying for everything then?". Actually my response would be quicker and firmer, but you get the drift.

AOL vs the web: Facebook vs Open Social etc etc pay walls are always evil.

no