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

[Tulse]

Aeronaut wrote: If I’m helping fund that science, why are universities so uptight about their intellectual property rights, and why do SpringerNet, IEEE, and IOP want $30 per article?

The problem with article costs is the private publishers, and not the government. The open access publishing movement has not come from private companies, but primarily from university researchers.

I think if their really is any flow of information between scientists, it’s informal or the result of some of them changing jobs. Hopefully I’m misunderstanding this…

Journals are where a lot of the free flow of information happens. If researchers were paid for discoveries by purely private companies, there wouldn’t be such journals period, as there is no incentive for private companies to share proprietary information. It is only because universities traditionally have been open with research, and uninterested in asserting control over findings, that we have such a tradition of open discussion of research results. Of course, as you note that tradition is changing as universities realize they can patent and make money off of research findings….