The Public Pays to Produce Research. Shareholders Collect the Return | Hacker News Reader

The Public Pays to Produce Research. Shareholders Collect the Return

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76 pointsjruohonen32 comments

Btw. You'd be surprised how many academics favor the good old publisher system over open access. The exorbitant library fees were always from the general budget. The open access publishing fees get charged to the labs publishing. And yes, often 1 layer down it is all the same government subsidies payed by your tax dollar. But the last layer just sees my dollar vs not my dollar.

The "goodest-oldest" publisher system is the learned societies that neither charge authors fees to publish nor lock their publications behind a paywall. These learned societies don't need to charge anyone any money (except for actual hardcopy printed volumes) because their operations are covered by the interest on massive endowments stretching as far back as the 19th century. Many national academies of science, and in the former Eastern Bloc the academic-publishing system inherited from the socialist era, work similarly. I'm lucky to be in a field where nearly all our journals and monographs are published this way (and Anna's Archive will have the rest), and it's a lot better than both the "good-old" system you refer to and modern "open access".

open access before Ai was mostly slop - with Ai its going to be a higher volume of slop.

socializing risk and privatizing profit

if you think about that statement a bit more deeply, how else are you going to incentivize a society as a whole to take risks? If all the risk from your actions is ultimately your responsibility, no one would take risks, no one would explore for the sake of it.

Solve by collecting taxes properly and then using the funds to provide research grants. Then it's a shared risk, shared reward.

But no instead we have our governments pissing away money on useless bullshit and private enterprise bending over backwards to avoid paying corporate taxes, entire countries who exist to be tax havens. And an apathetic voterbase who don't understand anything but will tell you why they don't like it all, anyway.

Corporate taxes should likely be viewed as an ROI on grants and tax breaks. A generational shift would likely need to happen to get there.

How much does Eli Lilly receive in grants or tax breaks and how much do they pay? Should the federal government break even or return 20%?

Research <> expensive human trials to obtain FDA approval. Voters and legislators are the only ones stopping government employees from doing the necessary human trials.

Word salad, and irrelevant to the OP.

This is the working hour

We are paid by those who learn by our mistakes

Governments (the investing public) should be paid royalties.

not just shareholders, rival nations too

How would this study’s methodology account for the public benefit from a new vaccine?

Edit: according to ChatGPT, it doesn’t:

> the analysis considers resources such as research funding, scientists' labor, data collection, analysis, and manuscript preparation. It does not assign an economic value to lives saved, illness prevented, or economic activity preserved by a vaccine

To my understanding the article clearly does not question the academic research itself but the way the results are published and who benefits from (the money returned by) such publications. Or am I misreading it?

The headline, at least, is making an comparison between shareholder benefits and public costs.

Why that particular combination? You could just as easily compare private spending and public benefits, and it would make about as much sense.

Maybe better to include both public and private costs and benefits?

Because when money from the state budget is spent on research you expect all of it to go into, you know, research. That means labor and material costs for people actually doing the work. Scientists, lab assistants, reasonable amount of administration.

Publishers are effectively stealing money from taxpayers. Research benefits the whole world but Elsevier's profits only benefit its shareholders. Every million sent to Wall Street funds could be used to start a project that might end up saving lives.

> How would this study’s methodology account for the public benefit from a new vaccine?

It shouldn't, because that doesn't make a lick of sense. Government-funded research came up with the vaccine. Why would the government owe a debt to private industry for selling it back to us?

If you paid for me to build a house that I rented back to you, should you be grateful for having a place to live?

That analogy doesn't make sense. It's more like you drew up the plans for house, someone else built it, but you're refusing to pay the developer for the part they did, because somehow, only drawing up the plans counts.

Academic researchers don't get a vaccine approved and manufacture it at scale. They do experiments and publish papers.

Shareholders = Public

money votes

That's... exactly how public services should work?

"The public pays to build roads. General Motors, ExxonMobil, and Amazon (delivery vans) collect the returns"

"The public pays for public schools. Shareholders (of any company that doesn't solely rely on menial labor) collect the returns"

Really? Your argument is shareholders who engage in menial labor of buy low/sell high should receive the most reward from collective labor investment?

Found Elon's HN burner account

Yes, I go to school, then I get a job, then my taxes pay for the school for my neighbours kids, they get and job, their taxes pay for the school aso. But, this chain is broken if the ones benefitting from public services don't give anything in return to finance those public services. A billionaire that made their fortune did it with the help of public services but usually, they tend to try to pay the less taxes possible.

>Yes, I go to school, then I get a job, then my taxes pay for the school for my neighbours kids, they get and job, their taxes pay for the school aso. But, this chain is broken if the ones benefitting from public services don't give anything in return to finance those public services.

That just depends on how you do the accounting, right? In a similar vein to how "police just exist to protect capital", it's not hard to construct a narrative how the whole point of schools and roads are to prepare workers to be corporate cogs and to transport them to work as corporate cogs. In the case of roads it'd be difficult to argue otherwise. For someone working 9-5, non-wfh, most of their road use is for getting to and from a job, in other words an activity that benefits corporations and their shareholders. On the flip side, if an amazon delivery truck uses public roads to send packages to you, is that only amazon that benefits (because $$$, obviously) or are you benefiting too?

> For someone working 9-5, non-wfh, most of their road use is for getting to and from a job

Nah - most of their road use will be embedded within every single product they consume across every waking (and sleeping) moment of their life.

Whether that's the immediately obvious direct road-transport involved in getting finished items from the farm / market / factory to their local store for them to be able to buy or whether it's the never-ending long-tail of indirect road-transportation usage that's ultimately critical to every aspect of modern life - from the most basic movement of raw material to produce energy (and the moment of the people who do the extraction and production), through movement of materials to grow their food - whether the literal seeds; the fertilisers, the raw materials to make the spade that was used and so on ad nauseam.

We had roads before automobiles.

your taxes, and a few extra trillion borrowed from future generations

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