Many types of information are produced with government money, including research results and other publications. Sometimes we are lucky enough to see these available for free on the web, or they are made available in the public domain. However, some of this information is published in copyrighted scholarly journal articles or patented by companies owned by the researchers who discover the information. The privatizing of research findings developed with government money has to stop:
-The results of all research done with government grants should be openly accessible.
-Employees of government agencies should not be allowed to publish books with commercial publishers (for an example, see the book Our Changing Planet: The View from Space, which contains NASA images and was written by NASA scientists).
-ALL drugs and tests developed with grants should be available as generics. The researchers should not be allowed to patent their discoveries and sell them to commercial firms or set up side companies to sell access to the discoveries that they made at taxpayer expense.
Comments (3)
I think we have to be careful here; you've picked at least one bad example, and I suspect that the drug/generic suggestion also has problems.
Your bad example is the photographs from NASA: those images should be, and are, in the public domain. Public domain means no restrictions. I can publish them with a commercial publisher, you can post them on your web site, and a government employee can sell you a book of them for a hundred million dollars - but you can always go get them from the public domain for free.
Not sure how to vote on this one.
You want the information to be free but want to prohibit book publishing? That doesn't make sense. Otherwise it's a good idea.
Shawn, I am not opposed to publishing books. I am opposed to having government employees publishing books that contain government images (and their interpretations of what those images show) through a commercial vendor rather than through the Government Printing Office (which means that it would be available in over 1400 Federal Depository Libraries for free). GPO has no profit motive, so it would charge libraries that choose to buy the book considerably less than a commercial publisher. The resource might also be available free on the web for all to use (even teachers in K-12 classrooms).
In the last year, Federal Depository Libraries have received 3 (three) puzzles from NASA. I am questioning why we did not get this book instead of the 3 puzzles.