Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I did go into greater detail, but the thread fractured into several pieces. I agree research is important, but the discussion was about publications of research. Anyone can post their manuscript online, but that doesn't necessarily make it accessible.

The concept of common pool resources is a useful framework here. The knowledge itself is a common good that is neither rivalrous nor excludable, but access to facilities, publishing venues, and grants is very much rivalrous.

Is it? Publishers aren’t financially enabling research. They’re providing the service of controlling its distribution, maintaining institutional exclusivity over respected work, & kingmaking scholars who play the game. Who’s actually funding the work?

Let’s be clear: taxpayers & students fund the research that happens at universities. Peer review is generally provided by volunteers funded the same way. Journals aggregate & sell researchers’ work back to their own taxpayer-funded institutions.

It’s insane that journals publishing publicly-funded work are able to price the public out of ever seeing it. IMO this likely has 2 prereqs: (a) universities are highly price-insensitive; (b) universities benefit from limiting expertise in the public domain.

Reality has a surprising amount of detail (1), a thread. Funders, researchers, publishers, & universities are interdependent. People say they hate the subscription model, but rank open access 8/10 in their list of priorities. 1. http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail …

Funders, the biggest of which get budget allocated from the government, fund research. They need to allocate their funds to the people who will do the best work, but they can't know that apriori, so they tend to rely on experts.