Wednesday, May 23, 2012

White House Petition For Open Access To Research

"This is a jobs issue. Startups and midsize business need access to federally funded technology research"

Yeah, sure, it's nice that businesses hire people that can read and I'm sure they do important work. Blah blah blah.

This is a public good. We're talking about basic research funded with public funds. Everyone who pays taxes should have access to works published from that funding (within reason). (Maybe if you don't pay US taxes you shouldn't have access, but that's a point for another time.)

To be specific, science should communicated to the public. I don't mean that the public should be viewed as having a "say" in what gets studied/published or not - that's for peer review and ethics boards. Feynman talks about how important this is. If your hypothesis can't ever be communicated to someone outside the discipline, then just maybe it's not a sound hypothesis. (I'm not sure he said that exactly, but that's as I see things.)

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