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Comment by dstick | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered, so now’s the time to ask I guess, why aren’t these publicly accessible? Aren’t they paid for with government (i.e. public) money?

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It's only partially supported by public money, as far as I can tell. Perhaps the industrial sponsors don't want it to be open access?

Luckily, the paper is accessible through SciHub it seems.

From the paper:

Funding: Financial support from The Dow Chemical Company and DuPont is acknowledged. T.E.C. and E.D.G. acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation under awards DMR-1609417 and DMR-1905550. K.P.B., A.L.Z., and E.D.G. also acknowledge support from the Center for Membrane Science, Engineering, and Technology (MAST) and the National Science Foundation under award IIP-1841474. M.K. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation under award CBET-1946392. B.G. and B.K. are funded in part by the National Science Foundation under award CMMI-1906194. B.G. and B.K. also acknowledge computing support from XSEDE TG-CTS110007

Even when you get a government grant for research, sometimes there are open-access requirements for publications, but sometimes not. It varies.

Paper directly written by government employees (like national labs) are usually accessible for free (like on https://www.osti.gov/).

>Paper directly written by government employees (like national labs) are usually accessible for free

I'm pretty sure all of them are required to be in public domain

Would it be possible to DPR these publications? I would assume that the funding agency retains a copy of the paper once published.

Some legislation has been proposed in the US Congress to require access to research paid for with tax money (seems pretty reasonable), but so far I don't think it's been able to get past Dr. No.

Not necessarily. I don't have access to the actual article itself, so I can't read the section of the article that indicates who funded the work. But several authors do list corporate affiliation (DuPont and Dow), not that that is itself proof of non-public funding.

The government probably doesn't care enough to bother setting up some sort of repository of papers.

Also, there are some pretty prestigious journals out there. I'm sure there are academics who'd want a whole lot more money if the government asked them to stop publishing in the journals that their peers read.

I believe all publicly funded research is open access after a year. NIH at least.

Read the article. It says it was funded by DuPont.

That doesn’t answer my question without prior knowledge. Luckily others did manage to provide an insightful answer.

> why aren’t these publicly accessible?

And you say: it’s sponsored by Dupont. So let me rephrase the question incorporating the new bit of information you provided:

Why would a paper be hidden behind a paywall if it’s sponsored by a commercial company?

It would make sense if it was completely off limits. But paying a few hundred dollars (?) means it is still semi public. It’s no secret, but it’s not public either. Why?

To prop up the journal, both financially and from an exclusivity angle. If the editors of the journal happen to be friends of DuPont, and the research is of actually that impactful, than a barrier to access might be beneificial

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