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0 pointsBrentRitterbeck16y ago0 comments

You severely misunderstand academic research. It is "given away" to get more research funds, to advance one's career inside academia, and to abide by the guidelines of the previous money you have taken.

EDIT: For some it's "given away" to fill some deep hole in one's ego.

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pcc16y ago· 2 in thread

I used to be an academic, with industrial research projects, for some time, so I'm relatively confident I understand how academia works.

1. I wasn't suggesting at all that academic research isn't paid for. Clearly the people doing the work somehow earn money and make a living, some of them exceedingly well. Nowhere was I suggesting that people do academic research for the pure love and charity of giving stuff away for free.

2. In large part, everyone gets to share and benefit from their output -- and most of those benefiting would have had no direct financial involvement with the work.

So, here we have a model where the product is available for free while the creators somehow earn a living (probably by being domain experts or by knowing how to apply their free "product" in the context of something more specifically revenue generating).

How is there not a correlation with; and a counterexample to; some of the arguments from the parent comment?

BrentRitterbeckOP16y ago

So, here we have a model where the product is available for free while the creators somehow earn a living (probably by being domain experts or by knowing how to apply their "product" in the context of something more specifically revenue generating).

Journals are not free at all. While many get access to literature through JSTOR, or some similar service, just for being affiliated with a research institution in one form or another, it's not cheap for those outside of the system or for those providing you access to JSTOR. My point is that the "industry" of academic research is not giving anything away for free. It's a business just like any other business.

pcc16y ago

This just sounds like nitpicking, its like saying that open source authors are not really giving anything away for free because the person downloading the code is getting charged by his ISP for the broadband access.

Sure there is a business of distribution, of getting the product to you, but this has nothing to do with either the creation or the inherent value of the product itself.

For example, lets say you pay $10 or whatever to purchase via IEEE a pdf of a paper that details a new way of solving a specific problem with patch antennas. How does the value of those findings correlate with that $10?

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