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Comment by yupthatsit | Hacker News Reader

I paid for the research with my tax payer money. Give me full access to the articles. Anything less is unacceptable (unless Nature wants to pay me back the taxes they owe me).

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There might be details I'm missing, but I think all NIH funded, peer-reviewed research needs to be publicly accessible within 12 months of publication.

http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm

Any Gates Foundation research is now required to be immediately available at publication as well:

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/how-we-work/general-informati...

Sounds like your beef is with the researchers or their teams for choosing a paid access publication, not Nature then.

Not all research is funded by tax payers.

Sounds like Libertarian propaganda. /s

Be prepared to name research projects that do not receive government funding in the first or second degree. (That is: receive funding directly, or from grant-making organizations that themselves receive substantial government funding.)

Any research funded by non-governmental organizations like the Howard Hughes Foundation, Michael J Fox foundation, etc, etc.

According to the way stem cell research was segregated, those projects would have had to take place in buildings funded without taxes, staffed by researchers paid by private funds, using new equipment and materials, etc...

A great deal of research funded by such organizations is done in combination with taxpayer funding, particularly with regard to infrastructure. As a cancer researcher I had funding from companies and foundations, but depended on my position in a tax-payer funded research lab to actually do the work.

Also, as charities they probably get tax advantages.

By that measure, everything is gov't funded. Thankfully the courts don't see it that way.

Your taxes are not funding international research.

I think the claim was that they were being funded by taxes, not that they were being funded only by the taxes they personally pay.

My company just had a paper accepted where we collaborated with Biogen Idec. Neither of us received government funding for the research.

Companies like OpenEye scientific publish many papers and proudly (for whatever reason) declare they have never received a government grant for their research.

When you work in an industry full of people with PhDs, lots of papers get published that didn't receive government funding; people with PhDs like to write papers.

> I paid for the research with my tax payer money. Give me full access to it.

though I have a similar desire I don't think that's a good argument for justifying it. why? evaluate the following symmetrical situations:

> I paid for the [tank, aircraft carrier, nukes, Fort Knox, etc] with my tax payer money. Therefore...

that said, I do think there's a greater net benefit to humanity, and scientific progress will accelerate, the easier, cheaper and less restrictive access we have to papers and research results.

> I paid for the [tank, aircraft carrier, nukes, Fort Knox, etc] with my tax payer money. Therefore...

That's not a very good comparison, as those are all rival goods, and furthermore have obvious negative externalities (IE are dangerous). I can't think of a non-rival government-funded good (without harmful externalities) that would NOT make sense to to make freely available.

Edit: Oh hey, I'm being downvoted for an opinion. Sitting at -1 right now.

Don't worry about early downvotes. (Also, don't complain about downvotes. That only makes the signal to noise ratio worse.)

Don't complain about complaining about downvotes.

Oh, I meant to educate about the culture, not complain.

Not sure why you're being down-voted. The comparison you were pointing out as being obviously idiotic is, in fact, obviously idiotic.

There's a far better comparison to be made with IP produced by NASA, for instance, which is automatically released directly to the public domain on the grounds that the American public is who commissioned it in the first place (for the rest of the world, it's a gift - you're welcome).

Not all IP; just most copyrighted images that NASA themselves produce. Patents by NASA are licensed to companies [1].

[1] http://technology.nasa.gov/patents

edit: Most of the biggest high profile publications from NASA get published in Science/Nature, which are both closed access FWIW.

Those are physically objects that cost a lot to replicate. The cost of making digital copies of research documents on the other hand...

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