Reply To: March 5-9 2007: 7th Symposium on Current Trends in International Fusion Research in DC

[Brian H]

Tulse wrote:

Once again, I insist that you misunderstand the purpose of patents.

Brian, I am not talking specifically of patents. Perhaps I have indeed misunderstood the issue you’re pursuing, but all I was addressing is the original claim that government grants impede the free flow of information among researchers. My point is that researchers who are publicly funded have no motivation to avoid publishing in academic journals, whereas the kind of “publishing” that commercial researchers do is often just patents, which are applied for well after the basic research is done, and which do no tend to offer the same wealth of information that academic journal articles do. I am not at all against commercial research or patents, but I think it is important to recognize the enormous and foundational contribution to the general knowledge of our species that is performed by publicly funded researchers who freely share their findings with each other and with us.

“freely share” ignores the actual money and decision flows. “Publicly funded” researchers compete for the favor of bureaucracies, described as Grantsmanship, resulting in bottlenecking and filtering by consensus and Big Science policy priorities, e.g.

As Vansig said above, “I’ve experienced the opposite: extreme paranoia and protectiveness within academics, because there are limited research dollars to go around.”